MARK WAGNER
Department of Psychology
Wagner College

Cognition and Visuospatial Thinking

The Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking
Edited by Priti Shah and Akira Miyake. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. xviii + 561 pp. Paper, $34.99.

To many philosophers, such as Kant (1781/1929), space and time are the two fundamental building blocks of human conscious experience. Therefore, it is not surprising that psychologists of every stripe have applied their own perspectives toward understanding human spatial abilities. The problem sparks the interest of psychologists specializing in perception, psychophysics, cognition, environmental psychology, neuropsychology, psychological testing, and child development, among others. In my experience, researchers in each of these domains are generally unfamiliar with the other approaches to studying spatial experience, resulting in a set of parallel but largely independent research literatures.