Teaching Spatial Thinking: Perspectives from Cognitive Psychology

Cognitive psychology primarily focuses on understanding of how humans represent and process spatial information. Cognitive psychology approaches to spatial thinking consider how we think about space (i.e., thinking in space, and thinking about space) and how we use space to think (i.e., thinking with space). This paper outlines topics to be covered on each of these topics in a course on spatial thinking, with recommended readings for each topic. Depending on the audience, it might be appropriate to put more emphasis on fundamental understanding or to also address applications of spatial cognition research, for example in education or to the development of spatial technologies. An important goal of any course in spatial thinking is to give students an appreciation of research methods in spatial cognition, including the types of inferences that can and cannot be made from different types of evidence to enable students to be critical readers of the literature.