Barbara Tversky ( from Stanford University) is going to hold a virtual colloquium about spatial cognition on Friday, February 25, 2005, 1:00 - 2:00 p.m. EST. It is about 'Multiple Mental Spaces'

We engage in spatial cognition from the first moments of life: where to look, where to reach, where to go. Each of these acts entails a different space and different set of behaviors; the behaviors become fine-tuned through experience. In contrast, talk about space does not directly access this knowledge; instead, it seems to be mediated by cognitive constructions that are only schematically based on this knowledge and that may introduce systematic bias and error.

Why do I blog this? Barbara Tversky is one of the most important researcher with regard to spatial cognition and mental models of space. Most of her work is headed towards the space of the body (Morrison and Tversky, 2004), the space around the body (Franklin and Tversky, 1990; Bryant, Franklin, and Tversky, 1992; Tversky, Kim, and Cohen, 1999), the space of navigation (e.g., Tversky, 2000), the spaces created by people to augment their cognition (e.g., Tversky, 2001) like diagrams, language, gesture and other behaviors.