human spatial cognition and behavior

Research Interests

My major research interests are in human spatial cognition and behavior. Researchers from many disciplines have studied human spatial knowledge of environments, including geography, psychology, computer science, planning, and linguistics. In the field of geospatial information science, or GIScience, the importance of studying cognitive issues has recently been recognized as well. The premise is that it is important to look at humans (and their cognitive processes) acting in space and reasoning about space, as well as physical environments or information about space per se. From this perspective, I study various issues of spatial cognition and behavior, particularly the interaction between humans, space, and information, based on theories and methods of social, cognitive, and behavioral sciences.

(i) Spatial Cognition and Environmental Psychology

Space is a fundamental entity or concept for humans, who live in and are surrounded by it. And then, how do they perceive the surrounding space? As people act in the environment, they acquire knowledge about it, store the knowledge in their minds, and use it to guide their behavior in adaptive ways. People's behavior is thus based not only on the physical environment, but also on the environment as perceived, conceived, and remembered. I study this fundamental process of spatial knowledge acquisition (called cognitive mapping) and the structure of acquired spatial knowledge (referred to by the famous metaphor cognitive maps). I am also interested in the psychology of people in space (e.g., feelings, beliefs, and attitudes), especially the issue of environmental aesthetics, namely how people evaluate or assess various environmental scenes. Other research topics include individual differences in spatial abilities, training of spatial skills or sense of direction, and the development of effective navigational aids.

 

(ii) Spatial Representations and Geovisualizations

Another research topic that I am interested in is human understanding of spatial representations, including maps, images, diagrams, and various other techniques of visualizations (sometimes called geovisualizations). Spatial representations are often used to show spatial (and nonspatial) information as a useful and effective presentation format, but at the same time they pose difficulty in understanding and use for some people. Also, individuals differ in learning styles or preferences: some people prefer visual or spatial methods and others prefer verbal methods. And in the case of verbally describing spatial relations, people should have different preferences for which frame of reference is used, for example, navigational directions given in a relative frame of reference (e.g., "see the hotel to the left") versus an absolute frame of reference (e.g., "see the hotel to the west"). I study how to present spatial information effectively, depending on the user's attributes and the purpose of a task, especially in the context of designing useful navigation support systems (e.g., how to design maps for mobile devices, how to provide speech guidance for navigation).

(iii) Spatial Thinking in Geospatial Science and Society

Space is a unifying theme across many fields of science and engineering. In geospatial science particularly, students need to master complex spatial tasks, spanning a wide range of scales (e.g., using and making maps, visualizing geologic structures from field observations, applying GIS operations such as buffering or overlaying); whereas a significant portion of students have difficulty with such high-level spatial thinking. To help students master the skill, various educational or learning materials have recently been developed, using interactive 3-D visualizations or animations. I am interested in examining the effectiveness of using these visualization techniques to foster students' spatial learning and thinking. Also from a broader, societal perspective, spatial information has been recognized as playing an important role in the development of information infrastructures. Notably ubiquitous networking envisions environments in which people have access to necessary information wherever they are, whenever they need it ("anyone, anywhere, anytime"). An important question that arises then is when and where one should provide information, in what format, and for what kind of user or task. I thus study human spatial behavior in the era of advanced information and communication technologies, particularly toward a spatially integrated ubiquitous computing society.