My research interests currently fall into four categories: human wayfinding and navigation; decision support tools for search and rescue management; comparative spatial cognition; and animal models of eating disorders. It goes without saying that this work is done in collaboration with colleagues and students. I've included links to their work; if you find any of this interesting, I encourage you to explore their web pages as well.
Human Wayfinding and Navigation
Although we live in a three-dimensional world, dealing with just two of those dimensions often gives us quite a challenge. Humans face this challenge even as infants ( Making space: The development of spatial representation and reasoning, 2000, provide a good overview ) and by the age of ten years we pretty much have acquired the procedures that we will use as adults. Since 1979, my colleague Edward Cornell and I have been investigating how children and adults learn navigational skills and the features of the places they live.To characterize our work in broad strokes, we have studied human navigation by looking at large-scale problem solving in urban environments--mostly our university campus and the surrounding residential areas. We've examined how people learn routes, how they follow these routes, and what happens when they lose their way. Our most recent work has looked at the process of "dead reckoning," which is a term from the ancient art of marine navigation. In dead reckoning (as opposed to an alternative process known as piloting), people judge their current location by using information from their past movements. The organization of learning, (1991) provides some examples. We conceive of dead reckoning as a retrospective process, involving memory for movements, as well as geometric inferences about how these movements can be combined into a path. You'll find some links to this work at the right, along with links to other approaches.
Search and Rescue Management
A search for a lost person, especially in Alberta, is a rare but commanding event. Search managers are highly-trained individuals who use a standardized methodology to deploy teams efficiently. Psychologists have contributed to this methodology through observations of lost person behaviour and the response of emergency response personnel. Lost Person Behaviour (1999) presents some of this research.
For the past five years, we have been involved in several projects funded by the National Search and Rescue Secretariat of the Government of Canada to describe lost person behaviour in Albertan wilderness areas and to develop effective tools to manage this information in operational settings. Our latest project is a system based on Geographic Information System technology that records the details of a search mission with reference to geographical locations.