AS.050.233: Lost in Space: How Humans Learn, Think, and Talk About the World Around Us
I designed and taught this class to seniors at Johns Hopkins University in Spring 2022. We mostly read and discussed research papers on spatial cognition, so it was an absolute blast (at least for me). Here’s a condensed version of the syllabus:
Overview
The ability to perceive, navigate, and explain space around us is essential in our everyday life: every day humans find their favorite coffee mug, make their way to work, hang their coat, and give directions to dinner guests with relative ease. How is this assorted set of tasks accomplished? How does the human mind structure the space around us and recognize the spatial relations between various objects? What happens when this ability is impaired? This course will attempt to answer these questions by sampling key concepts, theories, and experimental findings from a diverse set of disciplines, including neuroscience, psychology, and linguistics. We will get an overview of spatial cognition from multiple perspectives and draw analogies between different research paradigms.
The course will begin by examining the basic concepts and surveying the key research questions pertinent to the study of spatial cognition. We will then review research from psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience on topics including the representation of spatial navigation in the brain, the interaction between spatial and numeric cognition, the relationship between language and space, visual perception of spatial scenes, and spatial cognition in neurologically diverse individuals. The goal of this course is both to introduce you to the field of spatial cognition and to highlight how findings from diverse research fields can be brought together to illuminate this aspect of human cognition.
Schedule and readings
Week 1. Introduction
August 31: Landau, B. (2002). Spatial Cognition. In Encyclopedia of the Human Brain, pages 395–418. Academic Press.
Week 2. Space in the brain. Part 1: Cognitive maps and navigation
September 5: Labor Day – no class
September 7: Cheng, K. (1986). A purely geometric module in the rat's spatial representation. Cognition, 23(2), 149-178.
Spelke, E. S., & Kinzler, K. D. (2007). Core knowledge. Developmental science, 10(1), 89-96.
Week 3. Space in the brain. Part 1, cont’d: Cognitive maps and navigation
September 12:
Epstein, R. A., Patai, E. Z., Julian, J. B., & Spiers, H. J. (2017). The cognitive map in humans: spatial navigation and beyond. Nature neuroscience, 20(11), 1504-1513.
September 14:
Bonner, M. F., & Epstein, R. A. (2017). Coding of navigational affordances in the human visual system. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(18), 4793-4798.
Epstein, R. A., & Vass, L. K. (2014). Neural systems for landmark-based wayfinding in humans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1635), 20120533.
Week 4: Space in the brain. Part 2: Representation of objects and relations
September 19: Spelke, E. S. (1990). Principles of object perception. Cognitive science, 14(1), 29-56.
September 21: Amorapanth, P. X., Widick, P., & Chatterjee, A. (2010). The neural basis for spatial relations. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 22(8), 1739–1753.
Epstein, R., & Kanwisher, N. (1998). A cortical representation of the local visual environment. Nature, 392(6676), 598-601.
Epstein, R., Harris, A., Stanley, D., & Kanwisher, N. (1999). The parahippocampal place area: recognition, navigation, or encoding? Neuron, 23(1), 115-125.
Week 5. Spatial cognition as a modular system
September 26: Barrett, H. C., & Kurzban, R. (2006). Modularity in cognition: framing the debate. Psychological review, 113(3), 628.
(optional) Hermer, L., & Spelke, E. (1996). Modularity and development: The case of spatial reorientation. Cognition, 61(3), 195-232.
September 28: Cheng, K., & Newcombe, N. S. (2005). Is there a geometric module for spatial orientation? Squaring theory and evidence. Psychonomic bulletin & review, 12(1), 1-23.
Week 6. Interaction between spatial and numeric cognition
October 3:
Fischer, M. H., & Shaki, S. (2014). Spatial associations in numerical cognition—From single digits to arithmetic. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 67(8), 1461-1483.
de Hevia, M. D., Girelli, L., Addabbo, M., & Macchi Cassia, V. (2014). Human infants' preference for left-to-right oriented increasing numerical sequences. PloS one, 9(5), e96412.
October 5:
Newcombe, N. S., Levine, S. C., & Mix, K. S. (2015). Thinking about quantity: The intertwined development of spatial and numerical cognition. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science, 6(6), 491-505.
de Hevia, M. D. (2021). How the Human Mind Grounds Numerical Quantities on Space. Child Development Perspectives, 15(1), 44-50.
Week 7: Midterm projects
October 10 & 12: Mid-term project presentations.
Week 8. Spatial language: Introduction
October 17: Talmy, L. (1983). How language structures space. In H. Pick & L. Acredolo (Eds.), Spatial orientation: Theory, research, and application. New York: Plenum Press.
October 19: Landau, B. (2017). Update on “what” and “where” in spatial language: A new division of labor for spatial terms. Cognitive science, 41, 321-350.
Week 9. Spatial language: Functional perspective
October 24: Feist, M. I., & Gentner, D. (2003). Factors involved in the use of in and on. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (Vol. 25, No. 25).
Herskovits, A. (1986). Language and spatial cognition (Vol. 12). Cambridge: Cambridge university press (pp. 39-48, 73-84, 140-155).
October 26: Coventry, K. R., Lynott, D., Cangelosi, A., Monrouxe, L., Joyce, D., & Richardson, D. C. (2010). Spatial language, visual attention, and perceptual simulation. Brain and language, 112(3), 202-213.
Week 10. Spatial language: Learning
October 31: Landau, B. (2020). Learning simple spatial terms: Core and more. Topics in cognitive science, 12(1), 91-114.
November 2: Bowerman, M., & Choi, S. (2003). Space under construction: Language-specific spatial categorization in first language acquisition. In Language in Mind (Gentner, D. and Goldin-Meadow, S., eds), pp. 387–427, MIT Press
Week 11. Spatial language: Cross-cultural perspective
November 7: Majid, A., Bowerman, M., Kita, S., Haun, D. B., & Levinson, S. C. (2004). Can language restructure cognition? The case for space. Trends in cognitive sciences, 8(3), 108-114.
November 9: Li, P., & Gleitman, L. (2002). Turning the tables: Language and spatial reasoning. Cognition, 83(3), 265-294.
Week 12. Spatial cognition in special populations
November 14: Landau, B., Spelke, E., & Gleitman, H. (1984). Spatial knowledge in a young blind child. Cognition, 16, 225-260.
November 16: Landau, B., & Hoffman, J. E. (2012). Spatial representation: From gene to mind. Oxford University Press, pp. 123-170.
Week 13. Fall recess
November 21 & 23: No class.
Week 14. Visual perception of spatial scenes
November 28: Hafri, A., & Firestone, C. (2021). The perception of relations. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.
Kaiser, D., Quek, G. L., Cichy, R. M., & Peelen, M. V. (2019). Object vision in a structured world. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23(8), 672-685.
November 30: Dessalegn, B. & Landau, B. (2013). Interaction between language and vision: It’s momentary, abstract, and it develops. Cognition, 127, 331-344.
Hafri, A., Bonner, M. F., Landau, B., & Firestone, C. (2020). A phone in a basket looks like a knife in a cup: The perception of abstract relations.
Week 15. Course wrap-up (no readings)