Dr. Christoph Hoelscher, a cognitive scientist from the University of Freiburg, Germany, is visiting the UCSB Geography department from April until end of June 2011. Christoph is a psychologist by training, and an assistant professor at the Cognitive Science Center in Freiburg. He is a principal investigator on projects in the SFB/TR8 Spatial Cognition, Europe’s largest research center on spatial cognition. At the two sites in Bremen and Freiburg, psychologists, computer scientists, linguists, and geo-scientists investigate a range of cognitive phenomena around different levels of space, ranging from tabletop assembly tasks to large-scale navigation in robots.
Christoph’s research is centered around different aspects of how humans orient themselves and find their way around man-made environments, like complex public buildings and urban settings. He combines naturalistic observational studies in real environments with Virtual Reality simulations, laboratory based Eye-Tracking studies, and questionnaire research. Some of his urban scale work has looked at how people struggle with finding optimal routes even in highly familiar environments they have known for many years, and how the usage of SatNav systems can hinder learning the layout of a new environment. He and his team are actively collaborating with architects at ETH Zurich and University College London to understand human wayfinding in public buildings, utilizing Space Syntax as a tool to model environmental properties and relate them to human behavior. Christoph is an honorary senior research fellow in UCL’s architecture department. While most of the studies look at the users of buildings, his team also interviews practicing architects to investigate the way they think about spatial configurations and how they address the needs of building users. Christoph’s original research background in human-computer interaction and usability provides important concepts for this work.
Christoph will present an overview of his wayfinding cognition research in the Geography department colloquium in his talk “Navigating Architectural Space: Cognitive and Environmental Features”, to be held on Thursday, May 26, 3:30-4:45pm, in Buchanan 1930.
While at USCB, Christoph is working closely with Dan Montello’s lab and with Mary Hegarty’s group over in Psychology. Dan and Christoph are conducting joint experiments on navigation in virtual environments, and, together with Mary, look at inter-individual differences in spatial processing. For his research visit, Christoph is joined by Kerstin Garg-Hoelscher, an instructional designer from Freiburg University. Together they are working on a project to translate spatial cognition theory and research results into curriculum development and course materials for architectural design students. This is an effort to bridge between disciplines and to turn basic research into actionable knowledge to help architects design more user-friendly buildings.
Christoph is working in office 5709 EH, and some background info and his email address can be found on his homepage. All of us in Geography extend a warm welcome to our distinguished guest.
