SILC

Many areas of learning, such as language acquisition or reading, have a well-established infrastructure of conferences, journals, databases and so forth that encourage collaboration and the sharing of resources. By contrast, the infrastructure for research on spatial learning is just beginning. This initiative is aimed at changing this situation, in order to create a sound basis for research and education in this area, which can benefit investigators within and outside SILC and become self-sustaining beyond the duration of Center funding.

Upcoming Events:

♦ David Uttal is a member of the Geograhic Sciences Education Research Committee of the Roadmap for Geography Research Project (funded by NSF), National Geographic Society. Our charge is to set an agenda for geography education research in the coming decade. The panel includes a variety of researchers from different disciplines. We are in the process of finalizing our report.

♦ Thomas F Shipley and Dedre Gentner (Co-PI) are guest editing a special issue of Cognitive Processing on “Spatial learning and reasoning processes”. The special issue will have target articles and short reports on development of spatial thinking, assessing representations and processing of complex spatial relations, and the role of spatial thinking in science education. Target publication date May 15, 2013.
Note that Submissions are due September 1, 2012. Please, go to our Conferences and More page for more information.

♦ Thomas F. Shipley co-convened (with Mary Hegarty, Carol Ormand, and Eric Riggs) the Spatial Thinking Journal Club, which is part of the On the Cutting Edge faculty professional development program (NSF funded, NAGT sponsored), January-May 2012.

♦ In July 2012 there will be a follow-up workshop in Germany to the 2011 NYC SCAD workshop. Check back for more information.

♦ David Uttal, SILC Faculty Member, is co-chairing Spatial Cognition 2012 (SC 2012), August 31 - September 3, Abbey "Kloster Seeon" in Bavaria, Germany. More information: http://www.spatial-cognition.de/sc2012.

Past Events:

♦ Thomas F. Shipley, Mehul Bhatt and Christoph Hölscher co-chaired the SILC sponsored SCAD-11 Spatial Cognition for Architectural Design, November 16-19 2011, New York, New York. http://www.sfbtr8.spatial-cognition.de/cosy/Events/SCAD-11/

♦ Thomas F. Shipley co-chaired with Laura Carlson and Christoph Hölscher CogSci 2011 Expanding the Space of Cognitive Science 33rd annual meeting of the Cognitive Science Society July 20 - July 23, 2011, Boston, Massachusetts. http://cognitivesciencesociety.org/conference2011/index.html

♦ Thomas F. Shipley co-convened the Temporal Learning Journal Club, which is part of the On the Cutting Edge faculty professional development program (NSF funded, NAGT sponsored), January-May 2011.

♦ As part of our effort to build the field, SILC hosted Spatial Cognition 2010 (Mt. Hood/Portland, Oregon, August 15-19), an international biannual conference that brings together psychologists, geographers, neuroscientists and computer scientists.
Proceedings can be ordered from Amazon.com.

♦ Nora Newcombe (PI) presented a talk, Early Education for Spatial Intelligence: Why, What and How, on June 17, 2010, 6:00pm in Bremen, Germany.
More information:

Currently, our Spatial Network members span the United States and several other countries across the globe (see Figures 1 and 2 below).