Dr. Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University.
[1] Landau specializes in language learning, spatial representation and relationships between these foundational systems of human knowledge.
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.
One study looked at this relationship by comparing English, Korean and Japanese speakers on several tasks.
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.
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.
Another area of work surrounding spatial representation and language involves the different ways that people encode objects and places.
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.
Landau provides two explanations that work in tandem to explain the reasons that objects and places are encoded so differently.
For instance, exact sizes or distances are not generally encoded in language, unless in an agreed-upon, scientific system of measurement.
Landau has also participated in research on the question of the time frame in which language has the potential to modify spatial representations.
Overall, Landau's research provides evidence for an interaction between spatial representation and language, in which both play a role in shaping the other.
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).
When describing paths that start at one point and end at another, both children and adults regularly include the goal but not the source.
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.
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.
Research has shown that shape is viewed as more important than size or texture in learning novel object names in both children and adults.
In one study, a novel word was used as either a noun or a preposition to describe an object being placed in a standard position on top of a box.
Object shape and position were treated differently depending on whether people were making inferences about noun or preposition.
These results have the potential to address the Gavagai problem: the question of how children understand exactly what a novel word is referring to.
In general, the research that Landau has been involved in demonstrates that many aspects of word learning depend on paying attention to spatial features.
People with Williams syndrome have severe deficits in spatial understanding combined with a relatively intact language system.
Work done into the abilities of people with Williams syndrome to track multiple objects at once also reveals spatial deficits.
These consist of a collection of points of light, which when in motion together, show a human figure walking either left or right.
Blind children are able to hold abstract representations of spatial knowledge in mind and have a series of rules about how space exists.