Dr. Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation and relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is actually foundational to the other. She is known for her research on unusual cases of development and is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome.
Education & background Landau received her B.A. in sociology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1970, her Ed.M. in educational psychology from Rutgers University in 1977 and her Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1982. Prior to her current position at Johns Hopkins University, she was a faculty member at Columbia University, the University of California, Irvine, and the University of Delaware. She was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 2018. In addition, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Cognitive Science Society, the American Psychological Association, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Relationship between spatial language and spatial cognition
Landau's research focuses on spatial language, spatial cognition, and the way that the two interact with one another. In addressing this relationship, there are several possibilities. It could be that universal spatial representation leads to spatial language, that language shapes our representations, or each plays a role in shaping the other. Landau has examined these concepts in a number of different psychological settings to make sense of these possibilities.
One way of looking at the relationship is by examining the interaction between non-linguistic spatial memory and language. One study looked at this relationship by comparing English, Korean and Japanese speakers on several tasks. In tasks where participants had to describe spatial relationships, they used different types of language. For example, English speakers only used contact terms (e.g. touch, sit on) when a reference object was touching the top side of a figure object but Japanese and Korean speakers used contact terms regardless of which side of a figure object the reference object was touching. However, the languages did not differ on every dimension of language use. Axial terms, which refer to either the vertical or horizontal orientation of objects (e.g. left, above), were used consistently across languages.
When participants completed tasks where they were asked to view spatial relationships and to hold these in memory, participants were equally adept, regardless of which language they spoke. All participants had the greatest memory for orientations in which objects were in contact with one another or in which objects lay on an axis from one another (e.g. directly horizontally or vertically). Overall, there were distinctions in the use of languages to describe spatial relationships but not in the memory of these spatial relationships themselves. Landau's research implies that the perception of axial structure and of contact/support is foundational to cognition. Because they are such basic, underlying aspects of cognition, they are not impacted by the fact that these perceptions are described differently in different languages.
Another aspect of memory related to language that has been studied by Landau and colleagues has been feature conjunctions, which are the way in which people hold in memory multiple features of an object at one time (e.g. shape and color). Generally, this is difficult for people. In studies where squares were divided in half, with one half being one color and the other half being another, people recalled the way in which the squares were divided (e.g. horizontally, vertically or diagonally) but had difficulty recalling which half was which color. Verbal cues given during the memorization period (e.g. saying that red was left of green) improved memory for feature conjunctions but non-lingual cues (e.g. flashing colors) did not. Additionally, only directional language caused memory improvements: just saying that red was touching green was unhelpful. The explanation was that linguistic cues allow people to create hybrid representational schemes: temporary mental representations of the target that incorporate both the directional language and the spatial orientation of the target. These hybrid schemes are much easier to hold in memory than simple spatial representations.
Language is also relevant to the differences between spatial representations across species. A number of species in addition to humans are able to represent information spatially. For instance, when they are allowed to orient themselves and are then disoriented, many species, like mice and birds, are able to reorient themselves. Spatial representations are used preferentially, while non-spatial information is ignored, even if it is highly salient or would be relevant to the situation at hand. For example, when remembering a specific corner of a room, the length and shape of walls will be referred to but the color of the walls is often ignored. Evidence has been found that spatial representations occur in a specific area of the brain across species, most likely the hippocampus. Humans differ from other species in spatial representations in that language allows us to hold more stable spatial representations in memory such that they can be shared with others. Language helps to enhance memory of spatial representations but does not dramatically change them. In essence, language makes encoding more efficient, in that people can remember spatial representation in single phrases (e.g. to the right of the blue wall), rather than in mental images of the space itself. It allows humans to create a more unified representation of geometric and non-geometric information than other species.
Another area of work surrounding spatial representation and language involves the different ways that people encode objects and places. In general, we have mental representations of the things that we use language for. Landau has done work examining the geometric properties involved in people's representations of object nouns as opposed to spatial prepositions and has found differences in how the two are encoded. For object nouns, people's mental representations include detailed geometric features. These include things like the parts of the object, whether it is hollow or solid, and the orientation of the axes (e.g. the back, front, and sides of the object). For prepositions, people's spatial representations are much less detailed. The only shape information is about the axes and is basically a general "sketch" of the word. The spatial relationships communicated by prepositions also lack detail and consist of simple states (e.g. the objects are in contact, one object contains another) and relative distances.
Landau provides two explanations that work in tandem to explain the reasons that objects and places are encoded so differently. The first is the Design of Language Hypothesis, which is about the constraints of language itself. The theory is that language filters down spatial representations into a small amount of information. An infinite number of spatial relations can be encoded in representations but these don't need to be represented precisely by language. For instance, exact sizes or distances are not generally encoded in language, unless in an agreed-upon, scientific system of measurement. The second is the Design of Spatial Representation Hypothesis, which addresses innate human cognition. This hypothesis claims that mental representations are actually different for objects and places due to the fact that different areas of the brain encode "where" and "what" information. These systems must be able to consolidate information together, as humans need to understand what goes where but the information in these two categories is understood separately. Overall, what can be encoded by language is a factor, but a perhaps greater factor (as postulated by Landau) is that the brain is naturally equipped to handle places and objects differently.
Landau has also participated in research on the question of the time frame in which language has the potential to modify spatial representations. There are several mechanisms by which this modification can occur. The first, selectivity, is that language only encodes certain aspects of space, not all of them. Because not everything is encoded in language, people are attuned by language to pay attention to certain aspects of a spatial situation and to ignore others. Another mechanism is enrichment, which is the idea that language allows people to combine spatial information with other information in a simple phrase, leading to more stable mental representations. However, these modifications have been found to only occur on a temporary, task-by-task basis, meaning that language can influence human spatial representations but does not permanently change spatial cognition. Overall, Landau's research provides evidence for an interaction between spatial representation and language, in which both play a role in shaping the other.
Goals in spatial language Landau has done work on learning how people come to understand paths of motion and of transition and specifically, on the fact that people tend to show a preference for goals in explanations of these paths. Paths can be goal-oriented (moving towards something) or source-oriented (moving away from something). These can be physical paths through motion (e.g. the boy ran from the house to the fence) but can also include transition states (e.g. she sells fruit to the man). In using language to discuss paths, the speaker has to encode an accurate mental representation of the path and then choose which prepositional phrases to use to discuss it. When describing paths that start at one point and end at another, both children and adults regularly include the goal but not the source. This occurred even when people were cued with source verbs (e.g. ran from). Some words inherently have paths (e.g. buy and sell) but even for these words, people would make a statement like, "the girl sold a muffin to the man" much more often than "the man bought a muffin from the girl." Overall, people have a goal path bias when describing events, even when the events are neutral and the verbs used would allow for both options.
Further work by Landau and colleagues illuminates the fact that a goal bias developed in infancy, even before the emergence of a full language. Infants are able to perceive the sources of paths and to encode them but only if they are very salient. Therefore, it is not the case that a goal bias exists because infants are incapable of perceiving information of sources. However, when they are shown motion with a salient source and a normal goal, they encode information about the goal preferentially to information about a source. Thus, this bias towards goal paths is not linguistic but exists even before language abilities in humans. There are several possibilities for the origin of this bias. One is that cognition is dependent on moving forwards and on planning ahead, which requires specific attention to the goal. Relatedly, this goal bias may be specific to intentional events, which tend to be about moving towards an endpoint, rather than away from a starting point.
Learning object names