Mary Hagarty

Biography

Mary Hegarty received her BA and MA from University College Dublin, Ireland. She worked as a research assistant for three years at the Irish national educational research centre before attending Carnegie Mellon, where she received her Ph.D. in Psychology in 1988. She has been on the faculty of the Department of Psychological & Brain sciences, UCSB since then. The author of over 100 articles and chapters on spatial cognition, diagrammatic reasoning, and individual differences, she is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, a former Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow, and the former chair of the governing board of the Cognitive Science Society. She is Associate Editor of Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied and TopiCS in Cognitive Science and is on the editorial board of Learning and Individual Differences and Spatial Cognition and Computation. Her current research is funded by the National Science Foundation.

Research

Mary Hegarty’s research is on spatial thinking in complex activities such as comprehension, reasoning, problem solving and navigation. She studies the role of internal and external spatial visualizations in reasoning about such diverse topics as mechanical systems, weather patterns, and molecular structure and much of her work is concerned with the use of mental simulation/visualization in conjunction with analytic strategies in scientific problem solving. A unique characteristic of her research is that she studies spatial thinking from the perspective of individual differences as well as employing more commonly used experimental methods. In her work on individual differences, she studies large-scale spatial abilities involved in navigation and learning the layout of environments, as well as smaller-scale spatial abilities involved in mental rotation and perspective taking. Her current research projects focus on studying sources of variation in navigation abilities & strategies, and understanding why people with high-spatial abilities are more successful in STEM disciplines.