Uncovering Cognitive Biases and Blindspots to Teach Critical Spatial Thinking

Keywords: spatial cognition, critical thinking, pedagogy
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Monday
Session Start / End Time: 2/28/2022 09:40 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/28/2022 11:00 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 47

Abstract

Our initial and primary interaction with our environment from childhood and throughout the lifespan is through our embodied sensory modalities, including but not limited to vision, sound, proprioception, and smell. This perceptual approach to information gathering and the resulting experiential knowledge about our world, its features, and its patterns shapes our ability to learn geographic concepts such as scale, symbolic representation, and spatial correlation. Therefore, uncovering relevant cognitive biases and blindspots present in our spatial representations throughout development is important to teaching the next generation of spatial thinkers. I discuss how spatial cognition research and developmental approaches to spatial thinking can inform pedagogical approaches to spatial reasoning and geographic analysis.