BARBARA TVERSKY is professor emerita of psychology at Stanford University, where she taught and did research for thirty years. She is currently professor of psychology and education at Columbia Teachers College. She has published over 200 scholarly papers in journals and books and is regularly invited to speak at interdisciplinary conferences and workshops throughout the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Art Beyond Sight, Education and Cognition at the Institute Jean Nicod in Paris, and the International Conference on Design Creativity in Kobe, Japan. She was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and is a fellow of the Cognitive Science Society, the Association for Psychological Science, and the Society for Experimental Psychology.
Tversky began research on visual and spatial thinking because it was not only unexplored but dismissed as if it could be explained by language. Since then, her research has explored the many spaces that we inhabit and create, and brought her to collaborations with linguists, philosophers, artists, designers, architects, biologists, chemists, geographers, educators, computer scientists, information visualizers, creators of comics, museum designers, art educators, information designers, data scientists, and more.
Tversky has made groundbreaking contributions to at least four areas in cognitive psychology—memory, spatial cognition, event perception, and in externalizations of thought—and her work is cited widely by computer scientists, educators, geographers, artists, and designers as well as by her fellow psychologists.
She is the author of Mind in Motion: How Action Shapes Thought.
