Dan Montello

Affiliated Professor

Biography

Daniel R. Montello is Distinguished Professor of Geography and Affiliated Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he has been on the faculty since 1992. Before that, he was Visiting Assistant Professor of Psychology at North Dakota State University and Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute of Child Development, the University of Minnesota. Dan got his Ph.D. in Psychology at Arizona State University in 1988 and his B.A. in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1981. He was born in Ohio and moved to Wisconsin at the age of 8, growing up on a farm outside Portage, WI. Dan’s educational background is in environmental, cognitive, and developmental psychology. He has authored or co-authored over 120 articles and chapters, and co-authored or edited 8 books. He currently co-edits the academic journal Spatial Cognition and Computation and serves on the Editorial Boards of Case Studies in the Environment, Environment and Behavior, the Journal of Environmental Psychology, and the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. He teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on behavioral and cognitive geography and GIScience, introductory human geography, research methods, statistical analysis, and the regional geography of the United States.

Research

Dan’s research is in the areas of spatial, environmental, and geographic perception, cognition, affect, and behavior—essentially the overlap between geography and psychology. It pursues an understanding of human behavior, cognition, and emotion in and about space and place, including geographic learning and conceptualization, travel and mobility, cartographic communication, GIS functionality and equity, and environmentally-significant behaviors. Human behavior expresses the physical interface between human bodies and the surrounding world, while human mind emerges from the brain and nervous system in the physical body, embedded in a physical and sociocultural world, and represented externally in symbol systems such as maps and natural language. Projects Professor Montello has engaged in with his students and colleagues include work on spatial learning and education, navigation and orientation, the cognition of maps and geographic information displays, cognitive ontologies of geographic features such as regions, environmental attitudes, architectural psychology, and nature and urban psychology. His work is extensively multi- and interdisciplinary.