Barbara G. Tversky

Professor of Psychology Emerita, Stanford University and Professor of Psychology and Education, Columbia Teachers College. Her current focus is on the other way of thinking with the body and the world; using gesture, diagrams, sketch, model to think, to communicate, to create. Her work challenges the classical views of visuospatial representations, which assumed that the representations were either reducible to discrete language-like propositions or were veridical internal images of the visuospatial world. She showed that visuospatial representations of specific spaces, of our bodies, and of navigation all reflect perception and action in the world. Mental representations of one's body reflect the functional significance of body parts rather than their size; mental representations of the space around one's body reflect the relative significance of the body axes; and representations of space and navigation are biased by landmarks and paths. Her work can be thought of as characterizing the syntax, semantics, and pragmatics of visual communication and how they change one's own thought and the thought of others. Her work has informed and been informed by collaborations in linguistics, philosophy, computer graphics, visual analytics, AI, human-computer interaction, education, geography, the sciences, engineering, design, art, and literature-everywhere that space, the things in it, and spatial and temporal thinking, both literal and metaphoric, are key. Received awards and fellowships from the Russell-Sage Foundation, Society of Experimental Psychology, Cognitive Science Society, American Psychological Society, and Phi Beta Kappa.