The Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Geomatics Renewed for a Second Seven Year Mandate (2008-2015)

Created in 2001, the Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Geomatics seeks to understand the relationship between identity, the human body, and our environmental space. The chairholder, Dr. Geoffrey Edwards, and his team of researchers, are particularly interested in the mental representations people maintain of their spatial environment, the diverse ways we have of representating the relationship between the body and space (for example, the body schema, the body image, and so forth) in support of action, and the influence this intentional performance has on the continual process of identity renewal.

Understanding the relationships between the body and space is useful for a variety of different application areas. In this second mandate of his research chair, Dr. Edwards is working particularly with specialists in rehabilitation, museology and the performing arts. His research in cognitive geomatics seeks
(a) to help individuals with a disability to resituate themselves within a process of identity transformation and to evaluate the utility of immersive aesthetic environments to achieve this goal ;
(b) to situate the city museum as a catalyst for change in our modern urban environment, drawing on both the real and the virtual worlds ; and
(c) to develop new means of artistic performance that integrate a scientific sensitivity and exploit our body’s natural ability to understand the world, what one might call "body intelligence".

The tools and research methods used are extremely varied, as this work brings together many different domains and disciplines. The work of the chair will include ethnographic studies of the body as it manifests itself within virtual worlds such as Second Life, cognitively-informed engineering and design, behavioural experiments such as used in psychology or medicine, artistic design and creative processes, and evaluation methods developed within the field of education. As a result, the CRC in Cognitive Geomatics now functions at the intersection between the four main sectors of research and creativity, bringing together the natural sciences and engineering, the social sciences and humanities, the health sciences and the arts in order to develop new ways of understanding and acting.

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