Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Throughout the lifespan and across cultures, all human behavior happens in space. By early childhood, people are capable of navigating complex 3D environments, executing sophisticated motor plans, and coordinating action with others. They also use their representations of space to structure a variety of non-spatial concepts, including time, number, similarity, and emotion. How do people perform these cognitive feats? One source of insight comes from studying the diversity of spatial cognition: Although the physical properties of space are invariant, the way people typically conceptualize space varies radically across groups, between individuals, and over development. By studying this variation in spatial cognition, we can better understand the universal set of cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie it, with implications for the cognitive sciences, education, and design.