Our Mission
We're fascinated by a deceptively simple question: how do people think about space, especially when the stakes are high? The Geospatial Cognition Lab investigates how humans perceive, understand, and interact with spatial information, with a particular focus on emergency response, disaster evacuation, and high-stress decision-making.
Why Emergency Contexts?
Our lab director, Dr. Chelsie McWhorter, is a former firefighter and fire lieutenant. That experience shapes everything we do. When you've navigated a smoke-filled building searching for victims, you understand that spatial cognition isn't just an academic exercise, it can be the difference between a good outcome and a bad one. We bring that real-world perspective to our research, building bridges between geography and the fire service, emergency managers, and first responder communities.
Research Focus
Our work spans multiple domains of geospatial cognition, including:
- Cognitive processes in navigation and wayfinding
- Spatial decision-making in high-stakes environments
- Mental representation of geographic space across scales
- Human-computer interaction with geospatial technologies
- Spatial learning and memory
- Geographic education
Collaborations
Science is better with friends. We actively collaborate with researchers across disciplines and institutions: cognitive scientists, geographers, emergency and disaster scientists, urban planners, tech developers, and anyone else who gets excited about how humans make sense of the world around them.
Research Community
We share our work with and learn from these communities:
Contact Information
Email: chelsie [dot] mcwhorter [at] okstate [dot] edu
Address:
Fire & Emergency Management Administration
570 Engineering North
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078