Mitch Munns

Mitch Munns

Graduate Student

he/him/his

Advisor

Mary Hegarty

Research Area

Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive Neuroscience

Biography

Mitch received his B.S. in Psychology with minors in Cognitive Studies and Applied Math from Northern Illinois University. There he worked in Katja Wiemer’s lab exploring how abstract concepts are structured in memory, as well as in the CREATE Center with Michael Tscholl on a project involving children's learning from a robot. After NIU, he joined Mary Hegarty's lab at UCSB first as a lab manager in 2021, and then as a PhD student in 2022.

Research

Are there ways to spatially organize complex information, such as a lecture or textbook, that allow it to be learned more effectively? We seem to naturally create structure using space, time, diagrams etc. in anything that we do. I am interested in the connection between spatial cognition and other abstract types of thinking like this.