Handbook of Spatial Cognition

Spatial cognition is a branch of cognitive psychology that studies how people acquire and use knowledge about their environment to determine where they are, how to obtain resources, and how to find their way home. Researchers from a wide range of disciplines, including neuroscience, cognition, and sociology, have discovered a great deal about how humans and other animals sense, interpret, behave in, and communicate about space.

This book addresses some of the most important dimensions of spatial cognition, such as neurology, perception, memory, and language. It provides a broad yet detailed overview that is useful not only to academics, practitioners, and advanced students of psychology, but also to city planners, architects, software designers, sociologists, and anyone else who seeks to understand how we perceive, interpret, and interact with the world around us.

David Waller, PhD, is an associate professor of psychology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. His research seeks to understand all aspects of spatial functioning in people, including the ability to keep track of where things are in one's immediate environment, navigate between places, and remember spatial information. In addition to traditional laboratory experiments and correlational studies, his research has been at the leading edge of using real-time 3-D computer graphics as a tool for investigating environmental cognition.
 
Dr. Waller is cofounder and codirector of the world's largest immersive virtual environment facility (the HIVE) and is an associate editor for Memory & Cognition, the American Journal of Psychology, and Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments.
 
In his personal life, he is an ardent and zealous orienteer as well as a trail runner, pet owner, and gardener.
 
Lynn Nadel, PhD, is currently Regents Professor of Psychology and director of the Cognition and Neural Systems Program at the University of Arizona. His research, published in over 175 journal articles, chapters, and books, has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health, National Science Foundation, Eunice Kennedy Schriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, and several private foundations.
 
His work has focused on the functions of the hippocampus in memory and spatial cognition, leading to contributions in the study of stress and memory, sleep and memory, memory reconsolidation, and the mental retardation observed in Down syndrome. He has promulgated, with collaborators, two highly influential theories in cognitive neuroscience: the cognitive map theory of hippocampal function and the multiple trace theory of memory.
 
Dr. Nadel serves as the editor-in-chief of WIREs Interdisciplinary Reviews in Cognitive Science and is on the editorial boards of numerous journals in cognition and neural science. He was the corecipient in 2005 of the Grawemeyer Prize in Psychology, and he received the National Down Syndrome Society's Award for Research (2006).
 
He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists.