November 2003
Volume 16, Number 11
Isn't That Spatial
Where Psychology and Geography Intersect
Rather than being a psychologist employed in a non-traditional discipline, I am a "behavioral geographer" located in a geography department, working extensively with psychologists and publishing in the psychology literature. My bachelor's, master's, and PhD are all in geography. My interest in psychology originated after contact with an educational psychologist in New Zealand, who referred me to Piaget's works on space. During and after my PhD work at the University of Iowa, I helped develop a new area of geographic research called behavioral geography. This focused on spatial decision-making, environmental perception, geographic scale spaces, spatial cognition, and cognitive mapping.
The works of Piaget and Tolman guided much of my early interests. By 1970, I had interacted with psychologists such as Joseph Kruskal, Clyde Coombs, Doug Carroll, and Vic McGee while attending joint meetings of the Classification Society and the Mathematical Psychology Group. My interest focused on using non-metric multidimensional scaling to define representations of internally stored spatial knowledge, called "cognitive maps." My interest in spatial cognition developed during the 1970s, when I started interacting with psychologist Tommy Gärling, University of Umeä, Sweden, and solidified when I moved from Ohio State University to the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I worked jointly with Lawrence Hubert, James Pellegrino, Jack Loomis, Roberta Klatzky, and Daniel Montello. Collaborative work with Loomis and Klatzky has continued for 17 years, to this day. Our joint interests have emphasized spatial cognition, human way-finding, spatial updating, and sightless navigation. This latter interest came about after I became legally blind in 1984, an event which initiated a visit by Loomis and Klatzky, who offered to help in my rehabilitation. Recently, I also collaborated with psychologist Mark Blades, Sheffield University, on a project relating to a similar study.
I currently serve on an NRC committee on spatial thinking, where spatial scientists (e.g. geographers, geologists, astronomers, and mathematicians) and cognitive and developmental psychologists puzzle out questions relating to spatial thinking and reasoning on both local and universal scales.
Everywhere I have taught, I found helpful faculty in psychology interested in real world problems, refreshing colleagues who eagerly extended their interests beyond the laboratory into geographic space. What ties all this together is an interest in spatial concepts and how different groups understand those concepts. During these various co-operations, we have developed new methodologies, used established methods in different ways, and developed new technology designed to assist spatial information processing and use, such as the UC-Santa Barbara personal guidance system for blind travelers, originally conceptualized by Loomis.
I am also helping introduce geographic information science and its principal methodology, geographic information systems, to various disciplines of psychology and am contributing pieces on cognitive mapping to the Encyclopedia of Psychological Assessment and the Encyclopedia of Social Measurement.
Over the years, I have co-organized joint geography/psychology sessions at the quadrennial meeting of the International Geographical Union and the International Psychology Union in Sydney, and have organized sessions and participated in international psychology meetings in Kyoto, Japan and Stockholm, Sweden. In 1998, I organized a small meeting of geographers and psychologists at the Chateau de la Bretesche in France to discuss cognitive mapping and wayfinding. Looking back over the last few decades, I have probably published more joint work with psychologists than I have with geographers.
I feel at home working with psychologists, and have often been referred to as a psychologist rather than a geographer. I generally believe the disciplines share many concepts, but are usually separated by scale effects and the choice of experimental settings, such as laboratory versus real world geographic spaces. I hope more psychologists venture into "non-traditional" academic liaisons, and that geography is considered one of the most viable disciplines that could engage in such interactions.
Reference
Golledge, R. G. (2002). Handbook of Environmental Psychology: The open door of GIS. In R. B. Bechtel & A. Churchman (Eds.). Handbook of Environmental Psychology. (pp. 244-255). New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Reginald G. Golledge is a professor of geography at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Legally blind for the past 15 years, his interests in behavioral geography include spatial cognition, individual decision-making, and the acquisition and use of spatial knowledge. His recent research has included work on congenitally blind persons.
