Dr. Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation and relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is actually foundational to the other. She is known for her research on unusual cases of development and is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome.
Education & background
Landau received her B.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, her Ed.M. in educational psychology from Rutgers University in 1977 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. Prior to her current position at Johns Hopkins University, she was a faculty member at Columbia University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Delaware. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. In addition, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Relationship between spatial language and spatial cognition
Landau's research focuses on spatial language, spatial cognition, and the way that the two interact with one another. In addressing this relationship, there are several possibilities. It could be that universal spatial representation leads to spatial language, that language shapes our representations, or each plays a role in shaping the other. Landau has examined these concepts in a number of different psychological settings to make sense of these possibilities.
One way of looking at the relationship is by examining the interaction between non-linguistic spatial memory and language. One study looked at this relationship by comparing English, Korean and Japanese speakers on several tasks. In tasks where participants had to describe spatial relationships, they used different types of language. For example, English speakers only used contact terms (e.g. touch, sit on) when a reference object was touching the top side of a figure object but Japanese and Korean speakers used contact terms regardless of which side of a figure object the reference object was touching. However, the languages did not differ on every dimension of language use. Axial terms, which refer to either the vertical or horizontal orientation of objects (e.g. left, above), were used consistently across languages.
When participants completed tasks where they were asked to view spatial relationships and to hold these in memory, participants were equally adept, regardless of which language they spoke. All participants had the greatest memory for orientations in which objects were in contact with one another or in which objects lay on an axis from one another (e.g. directly horizontally or vertically). Overall, there were distinctions in the use of languages to describe spatial relationships but not in the memory of these spatial relationships themselves. Landau's research implies that the perception of axial structure and of contact/support is foundational to cognition. Because they are such basic, underlying aspects of cognition, they are not impacted by the fact that these perceptions are described differently in different languages.
Another aspect of memory related to language that has been studied by Landau and colleagues has been feature conjunctions, which are the way in which people hold in memory multiple features of an object at one time (e.g. shape and color). Generally, this is difficult for people. In studies where squares were divided in half, with one half being one color and the other half being another, people recalled the way in which the squares were divided (e.g. horizontally, vertically or diagonally) but had difficulty recalling which half was which color. Verbal cues given during the memorization period (e.g. saying that red was left of green) improved memory for feature conjunctions but non-lingual cues (e.g. flashing colors) did not. Additionally, only directional language caused memory improvements: just saying that red was touching green was unhelpful. The explanation was that linguistic cues allow people to create hybrid representational schemes: temporary mental representations of the target that incorporate both the directional language and the spatial orientation of the target. These hybrid schemes are much easier to hold in memory than simple spatial representations.