UCSB Personal Guidance System - Project Personnel

Jack Loomis is Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He received a B.A. in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1967 and a Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Michigan in 1971. He spent the period from 1971-1974 as a postdoc at Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco working on the Tactile Vision Substitution System project (headed by Paul Bach-y-Rita and Carter Collins) and developing ideas about optic flow processing with Ken Nakayama. Since then, he has been on the faculty at UCSB.

Loomis's earlier research interests were in color vision and tactual perception. Since 1986 his research has focused on perceiving and acting in space-his research interests include visual space perception, visual control of locomotion, auditory space perception, spatial cognition, spatial aspects of nonverbal interaction, and use of virtual reality technology in basic psychological research. In 1985, he came up with the concept and design for a navigation system for visually impaired people, with virtual sound as part of the user interface. Since then he has been director of the resulting project, overseeing both development of the navigation system and the related basic research. He is also an instrument-rated pilot with an interest in improving aviation safety.

Professor Reginald G. Golledge is a Professor of Geography at UCSB. He is a senior professor with interests in behavioral geography, including disaggregate transportation modeling, spatial cognition, cognitive mapping, individual decision-making, household activity patterns, and the acquisition and use of spatial knowledge across the life span. His research has included work on adults, children, teenagers, mentally retarded persons, and adventitious and congenitally blind people. He has had more than two decades of experience in designing survey instruments and collecting data in both field and laboratory situations. He has published extensively in the literature of several fields including geography, regional science, and psychology. He has considerable experience supervising post-doctoral researchers, Ph.D., and Master students, in managing large grants and contracts, and has been chair of his department.

Professor Golledge has written or edited fourteen books, sixty chapters in books, more than 100 papers published in refereed academic journals, and about 150 miscellaneous publications including technical reports, book reviews, published research notes, and so on. He has presented more than two hundred papers at local, regional, national, and international conferences in geography, regional science, planning, psychology, and statistics. He received an Association of American Geographers Academic Honors Award in 1981 and the Institute of Australian Geographers International gold medal in 1999. He was a Guggenheim Fellow in 1987-88. He is an Honorary Life-Time Member of the Institute of Australian Geographers and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. He has been Associate Editor and Editor of the journal Geographical Analysis and a Founding Editor of the journal Urban Geography. He has served on Editorial Boards of the Annals of the Association of American Geographers, The Professional Geographer, Tijdschrift Voor Economische en Sociale Geografie, Environment and Behavior, and The Journal of Spatial Cognition and Computation, and he has been a reviewer for many different journals, as well as for the National Science Foundation, the National Institute of Justice, the National Institute of Health, the Canada Council, the Australian Research Grants Council, and the European Science Foundation. Professionally, he has served on national research grants committees, on the AAG Honors Committee, and three times on the AAG Program Committee — acting as chair of that committee for the San Diego Meetings. In 1998-99 he was elected Vice President of the Association of American Geographers, he was elected President for 1999-2000 and is currently Past-President.

Professor Golledge became legally blind in 1984. He now works almost exclusively in a multi-researcher environment. Over the years he has worked with statisticians, educational psychologists, cognitive psychologists, cognitive scientists, developmental psychologists, economists, planners, and regional scientists, as well as transportation engineers. His collaborative research has taken place within the United States and in Canada, England, Sweden, The Netherlands, New Zealand, and Australia. He has also interacted extensively with the private sector, including state governments and transportation planning agencies in the states of New South Wales, Victoria, and West Australia in Australia; the National Government of The Netherlands; and with private firms in Japan, Canada, and the United States.

Roberta Klatzky is Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is also on the faculty of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition and the Human-Computer Interaction Institute. She received a B.S. in mathematics from the University of Michigan and a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from Stanford University. Before coming to Carnegie Mellon, she was a member of the faculty at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Klatzky's research interests are in human perception and cognition, with special emphasis on spatial cognition and haptic perception. She has done extensive research on human navigation under visual and nonvisual guidance, haptic and visual object recognition, and motor planning. Her work has application to navigation aids for the blind, haptic interfaces, exploratory robotics, teleoperation, and virtual environments.

Professor Klatzky is the author of over 150 articles and chapters, and she has authored or edited 4 books.

Honors and Awards

Educational
Michigan Regents-Alumni and General Motors scholarships
James B. Angell Scholar
Phi Beta Kappa
National Science Foundation Graduate Fellow

Professional
Fellow, Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences
Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science
Fellow, American Psychological Assn., Divisions 1 and 3
Charter Fellow, American Psychological Society
Society of Experimental Psychologists (honorary society)

Professional Service
Professor Klatzky has been a member of the National Research Council's Committee on Human Factors and Committee on Techniques for Enhancing Human Performance, as well as other working groups of the NRC. Her service to scientific societies includes chairing the governing board of the Psychonomics Society, the Psychology Section of AAAS, and the International Association for the Study of Attention and Performance, as well as serving currently as Treasurer of the American Psychological Society and member of the Board of Scientific Affairs of the American Psychological Assn. She has been a member of research review panels for the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. She is a member of several editorial boards.