Geospatial Thinking Framework

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Geospatial thinking has become an important focus in understanding human spatial behaviors, but meaningful definitions, theories, and models of geospatial thinking are lacking. This interdisciplinary research project will address these gaps in knowledge by examining the behavioral and neurological correlates of geospatial thinking. Geospatial thinking is primarily a cognitive construct, occurring in the human brain. This project aims to develop a robust model that will have foundations in behavioral and cognitive neurogeography and will represent a new way to conceptualize and investigate geospatial thinking. This project will contribute new insights regarding neurogeography that are different from more traditional investigations of spatial cognition in neuroscience by placing emphasis on the ecological validity of geospatial tasks, issues, and questions. In doing so, it will focus on the grounding of geospatial activities in real-world activities and will consider the on-the-ground nature of the questions that are under investigation. The project will provide special research and training opportunities for graduate and undergraduate students.The investigators will generate research questions for this project from a synthesized Geospatial Thinking Framework, which includes three axes: space, time, and attribute. Geospatial thinking skills will be organized based on category (the axes) and complexity (position relative to origin). Two research questions will be posed. What is the relationship between each geospatial thinking skill and the geographic primitives as represented by the framework axes? What is the relative complexity of each geospatial thinking skill as represented by distance from axes origin? These research questions will be investigated through a combined methodology of behavioral testing and neuroimaging (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI). Behavioral testing will include traditional and newly-developed measures of performance on geospatial cognition tasks. All measurement instruments will be assessed for reliability and validity (if not already available). The fMRI methods will include both block and event-related designs. Analysis will focus on the blood-oxygen-level dependent signal detection for both the whole brain as well as the specific parts of the brain of most interest, which is especially relevant for dorsal and ventral analyses.