The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking

by Priti Shah (Editor), Akira Miyake (Editor)

Overview

The ability to navigate across town, comprehend an animated display of the functioning of the human heart, view complex multivariate data on a company's website, or to read an architectural blueprint and form a three-dimensional mental picture of a house are all tasks involving visuospatial thinking. The field of visuospatial thinking is a relatively diverse interdisciplinary research enterprise. An understanding of visuospatial thinking, and in particular, how people represent and process visual and spatial information, is relevant not only to cognitive psychology but also education, geography, architecture, medicine, design computer science/artificial intelligence, semiotics and animal cognition. The goal of this book, first published in 2005, is to present a broad overview of research on visuospatial thinking that can be used by researchers as well as students interested in this topic in both basic research and applied/naturalistic contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781316450352
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	07/18/2005
Series:	Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Akira Miyake is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder and a Faculty Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Science. He has published in the areas of working memory, executive functions, language comprehension and spatial thinking in such journals as Cognitive Psychology and Journal of Memory and Language.
Priti Shah is Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She has published in the areas of spatial thinking, graphical display comprehension and working memory in such journals as Memory & Cognition, the Journal of Educational Psychology and Science Education.

Table of Contents

1. Functional significance of visuospatial representations Barbara Tversky; 2. Visuospatial images Daniel Reisberg and Friderike Heuer; 3. Disorders of visuospatial working memory Robert Logie and Sergio Della Sala; 4. Individual differences in spatial abilities Mary Hegarty and David Waller; 5. Sex differences in visuospatial abilities: more than meets the eye Diane F. Halpern and Marcia L. Collear; 6. Development of spatial competence Nora S. Newcombe and Amy E. Learmonth; 7. Navigation Daniel R. Montello; 8. Mapping the understanding of understanding maps Holly A. Taylor; 9. Spatial situation models Mike Rinck; 10. Design applications of visual spatial thinking: the importance of frame of reference Christopher D. Wickens, Michele Vincow and Michele Yeh; 11. The presentation and comprehension of graphically-presented data Priti Shah, Eric G. Freedman and Ioanna Vekiri; 12. Multimedia learning: guiding visuospatial thinking with instructional animation Richard E. Mayer.

Editorial Reviews

"Collection of 12 articles, each with an extensive bibliography, that aims to present a broad overview of research, focusing on higher-level visuospatial thinking from visual imagery to diagrammatic reasoning. Useful for those in design, architecture, medicine, semiotics, HCI and geography."
—Design Issues

From the Publisher