Brief Description: In this talk, Mary Hegarty will review evidence for large individual differences in human navigation ability, or what is commonly referred to as the "sense of direction". She will review how cognitive psychologists study study navigation ability in both real and virtual environments, what we know so far about the individual variation in this ability, and current directions of research in this area.

About the speaker:

Mary Hegarty is Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California Santa Barbara. She received her BA and MA in Psychology from University College Dublin, Ireland and worked at the Irish national educational research centre before attending Carnegie Mellon, where she received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1988. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychological & Brain sciences, University of California, Santa Barbara since then. Her research interests include spatial cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, and individual differences. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, and a former Spencer Fellow. She served as Associate Dean of the Graduate Division at UCSB, Chair of the governing board of the Cognitive Science Society and as Associate Editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and TopiCS in Cognitive Science. She is on the editorial boards of Spatial Cognition and Computation and Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation and the Office of Naval Research.

Registration is free and open to all. Simply click here or use the registration bar below to register.