The American Psychological Association (APA) has been conducting Advanced Training Institutes (ATIs) to introduce psychological scientists to emerging technologies and the most current research methodologies. This year’s final ATI was held on August 16, 2007 in San Francisco and was devoted to introducing “Geographic Information Systems for Psychological Research” to a select group of psychological scientists. Nicolle Singer, the APA Science Programs Associate, invited Professor Reginald Golledge, as a leading behavioral geographer and expert in GIS applications to human research, to direct the ATI. Co-directors included Dr. Michael Goodchild (the world’s pre-eminent GIS expert), geographer and psychologist Professor Daniel Montello (an expert in Spatial Cognition, Cognitive Cartography, and Environmental Psychology), and Professor Stephen Hirtle (Pittsburgh; an expert on Spatial Information Processing and editor of the journal Spatial Cognition and Computation).
The one-day workshop consisted of the presentation of selected geographic topics relating to GIS and to Psychology. Goodchild began the morning session with an explanation of the nature of GIS technology, social science applications, and a discussion of how and why GISc developed; and Golledge followed this up with a discussion of selected applications relating to spatial analysis, wayfinding, cognitive maps, and disability studies. The afternoon session was devoted to presentations by Montello and Hirtle on research issues relating to GIS and Psychology, such as spatial cognition, cognitive cartography, spatial information processing, spatial cognition and computation, and human-computer interfaces. For more, see http://www.apa.org/science/ati_gis.html.
