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Greetings from the other side of my minor doctoral candidacy exam! I can’t believe it was almost a year ago that I blogged about completing my major exam. Time flies when you’re having fun. Good thing that, for me, fun is writing about connections between environmental psychology, cognitive psychology, and visualization techniques used in urban planning!
My doctoral committee includes an environmental psychologist, a social psychologist, and an urban planner. One of their jobs in creating my exam was to help me learn how to research effectively across disciplines. The intended outcome was for me to understand some visualization tools used in participatory urban planning and connect their utility to basic theories in cognitive and environmental psychology.
Cool exam topic, don’t you think?
Here’s a bit of context: You’ve probably attended a public forum, community meeting, or similar gathering where someone (maybe a municipality staff member, a local architect, or property developer) was proposing a change to the neighbourhood. Perhaps the presentation was given using a 2-dimensonal map, or a 3D model of the setting. Perhaps Google Earth was used to help you visualize the environment (or some other type of computerized graphical software). Really, the intention of each visual format is the same: to assist viewers in understanding the setting and any proposed changes to it.
I remember sitting in a neighbourhood advisory committee meeting a few years ago and thinking: “what if this particular visualization method of delivery isn’t working for everyone… what if some people are disengaging because of the way the information is being presented, as opposed to what is being proposed?” It’s interesting that so long after attending that meeting, a portion of my minor exam touched on the notion of cognitive style, and how it could come into play for urban planners using visualization media to enhance public understanding of a project (and how viewers might make decisions about a project's numerous variables).
The term “cognitive style” refers to a psychological dimension that represents consistencies in an individual’s manner of cognitive functioning (i.e., information acquisition and processing) (Harvard Mental Imagery and Human-Computer Interaction Lab, 2013). Because the human visual system distinctly processes properties about objects (colour, shape) and space (location and spatial relations), Kozhevnikov, Kosslyn, and Shephard (2005) use neuropsychological evidence to propose the Object-Spatial-Verbal theoretical model of cognitive style. They outline three independent dimensions: Object imagery, spatial imagery, and verbalization to explain that object visualizers prefer to construct “vivid, concrete, and detailed images of individual objects,” while spatial imagers “schematically represent spatial relations of objects and spatial transformations” (Kozhevnikov, Kosslyn, & Shephard, 2005). Verbalizers “prefer to process and represent information verbally and rely on non-visual strategies.” (Kozhevnikov, Kosslyn, & Shephard, 2005).
[Which cognitive style are you, do you think?]
A portion of my minor exam allowed me to think about how cognitive style literature could help planners tailor visualization media to participants’ individual differences in decision making based on visual stimuli. Arguably, information presented in ways that satisfy numerous cognitive styles could assist participants with being engaged with the information (and, thus, feel more willing to contribute in a participatory activity and perhaps make more informed decisions). Maybe if participants’ cognitive styles were measured before visualization tools were used in a participatory planning activity, presentations could be customized to accommodate both the dominant cognitive style of the group, as well as other cognitive styles through differing formats of visualization.
Of course, there’s a lot more to consider and perhaps I’ll delve deeper into this topic in another blog post. My message this month is that even though the concepts outlined in my exam were rooted largely in the literature of cognitive psychology, it occurs to me that, when applied to urban planning, they link to the realm of environmental psychology. Our field examines environment-behaviour relations that inevitably connect with theories about how we make decisions, and how individual differences in cognition impact environmental perceptions, attitudes, and behaviours. It’s all related! And this realization, I believe, was the real point of my candidacy exam.
References
Harvard Mental Imagery and Human-Computer Interaction Lab. (2013). Neural correlates of object vs. spatial visualization abilities. Retrieved from: http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/mkozhevnlab/?page_id=663
Kozhevnikov, M., Kosslyn, S., & Shephard, J. (2005). Spatial versus object visualizers: A new characterization of visual cognitive style. Memory and Cognition, 33, 710-726.
