New Graduate Student Mitchell Munns

Mitchell Munns graduated from Northern Illinois University with a B.S. in Psychology in 2021. He joins the Hegarty Spatial Thinking Lab as a PhD student after working as a lab manager the previous year. His work is centered on how people use space to think about things that aren't inherently spatial. For example, in science, graphs are used to visually represent relationships between variables, and in daily life we use metaphorical spatial language (such as 'on the one hand...') as well as gestures to represent connections between abstract ideas by grounding them on something concrete. Mitchell's interests also include the connection between different components of spatial cognition, i.e. navigating vs. mentally rotating an object vs. interpreting a graph, and how all of this relates to learning and memory.