The Cambridge Handbook Of Visuospatial Thinking (cambridge Handbooks In Psychology)

The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking 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 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 to education, geography, architecture, medicine, design, computer science/artificial intelligence, semiotics, and animal cognition. The goal of this book 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. 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 the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, the Journal of Educational Psychology, and Science Education. Akira Miyake is Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is a Fellow of both American Psychological Association (Division 3: Experimental Psychology) and American Psychological Society. He has published in the areas of working memory, executive functions, language comprehension, and spatial thinking in such journals as Cognitive Psychology and the Journal of Memory and Language, and has been serving as Associate Editor for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Akira Miyake and Priti Shah are co-editors of another Cambridge University Press book (published in 1999), Models of Working Memory: Mechanisms of Active Maintenance and Executive Control. The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking Edited by PRITI SHAH & AKIRA MIYAKE cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, S˜ao Paulo Cambridge University Press 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011-4211, usa www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521807104 C Cambridge University Press 2005 This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2005 Printed in the United States of America A catalog record for this publication is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data The Cambridge handbook of visuospatial thinking / edited by Priti Shah, Akira Miyake. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indexes. isbn 0-521-80710-7 (hardback) – isbn 0-521-00173-0 (pbk.) 1. Mental representation. 2. Space perception. 3. Imagery (Psychology) 4. Visualization. 5. Thought and thinking. I. Shah, Priti, 1968– II. Miyake, Aki