There has always been a stereotype that females have a better social cognitive understanding than males, while the latter have a stronger sense of their surroundings. I have a bad sense of direction myself, but I’m good at standing for the position of others. It is found that many girls are good at navigating socially and generally boys can easily adapt to the perspective of others. It makes me believe that the stereotype that I mentioned earlier is untrue and that there must be some other genetic or environmental factors affecting these abilities. Different spatial and social cognitive abilities and what accounts for these differences are intriguing to me, which is why I chose psychology as my major and later decided to focus my research on human’s spatial and social cognitive abilities.
During my first year of graduate school I read lots of research articles on the field of spatial cognition. I then then noticed that people showed significant differences when performing the same spatial tasks such as mental rotation, which compelled me to wonder what accounts for it. To figure it out, I read …show more content…
Saylor mainly focuses on the intersection between language and representation, especially absent reference understanding. Her work compels me to ask a few questions. For example: How does spatial and social cognitive abilities influence absent reference understanding? How does relationship between two hidden objects influence spatial memory? In addition, Dr. Saylor has also studied agent-reasoning and the conceptual basis of human-robot interaction. This research compels me to wonder does the spatial PT, a quite basic ability of reasoning about other people’s mental representations, promotes more sophisticated forms of mind reasoning? What is the relationship between people’s concepts about agent and categorization? I expect to conduct relevant research to answer these questions and other valuable questions by pursuing a PhD program with Dr. McNamara and Dr.
During my first year of graduate school I read lots of research articles on the field of spatial cognition. I then then noticed that people showed significant differences when performing the same spatial tasks such as mental rotation, which compelled me to wonder what accounts for it. To figure it out, I read …show more content…
Saylor mainly focuses on the intersection between language and representation, especially absent reference understanding. Her work compels me to ask a few questions. For example: How does spatial and social cognitive abilities influence absent reference understanding? How does relationship between two hidden objects influence spatial memory? In addition, Dr. Saylor has also studied agent-reasoning and the conceptual basis of human-robot interaction. This research compels me to wonder does the spatial PT, a quite basic ability of reasoning about other people’s mental representations, promotes more sophisticated forms of mind reasoning? What is the relationship between people’s concepts about agent and categorization? I expect to conduct relevant research to answer these questions and other valuable questions by pursuing a PhD program with Dr. McNamara and Dr.