About

Daniel R. Montello is a Distinguished Professor of Geography and an Affiliated Professor of Psychological & Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB), where he has been on the faculty since 1992. His educational background includes a Ph.D. in Psychology from Arizona State University obtained in 1988 and a B.A. in Psychology from Johns Hopkins University in 1981. He was born in Ohio and grew up on a farm outside Portage, Wisconsin. His research focuses on the areas of spatial, environmental, and geographic perception, cognition, affect, and behavior, which represent the intersection of geography and psychology. His work aims to understand human behavior, cognition, and emotion in relation to space and place, including geographic learning, travel, cartographic communication, GIS functionality and equity, and environmentally significant behaviors. Montello has authored or co-authored over 120 articles and chapters and has co-authored or edited 8 books. He currently co-edits the academic journal Spatial Cognition and Computation and serves on the editorial boards of several other journals. His teaching includes undergraduate and graduate courses on behavioral and cognitive geography, GIScience, human geography, research methods, statistical analysis, and regional geography of the United States. His projects involve interdisciplinary research on spatial learning, navigation, map cognition, geographic feature ontologies, environmental attitudes, architectural psychology, and urban psychology.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Cognitive psychology
• Philosophy
• Neuroscience
• Simulation
• World Wide Web
• Social psychology
• Cognitive science
• Cartography
• Epistemology
• Algorithm
• Geography

Selected publications

• Space syntax and spatial cognition:

  UCL Press eBooks · 2025-04-30

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Mapping the response: A survey of municipal firefighter navigation training and practices in the United States

  International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction · 2025-04-08 · 1 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How do first responders successfully arrive to all the unique addresses they are called to for emergencies? This work investigates how firefighters are trained to navigate their response areas through the development of cognitive maps. It also seeks to understand what navigation tools are available to ensure successful navigation, and how firefighters use these tools. Using an online survey, we collected training, navigational aid, and demographic data from over 200 firefighters across North America. Our mixed-methods analysis identified that firefighter navigation training is predominantly carried out informally. Firefighters use a variety of navigation tools to supplement their cognitive maps, including generic aids such as Google Maps, as well as fire service specific aids such as runbooks or software applications. Redundancy within navigation aids was important, with most participants having access to technology and non-technology navigational tools. These results expand our understanding of professional navigators in the particularly rich and important context of firefighting, provide additional insight on navigation under time stress, and create an opportunity to refine navigation training curricula for first responders. • Firefighters develop detailed cognitive maps of their response areas, beyond routing. • Firefighter navigation training is a patchwork of practices sharing common themes. • A standardized curriculum on navigation is missing from current firefighter training. • To provide redundancy to their cognitive maps, they rely on a variety of spatial aids. • Firefighters create their own navigation aids, games, and spatial learning tactics.

  PublisherDOI

• A unified framework integrating psychology and geography

  Nature Human Behaviour · 2025-07-03 · 5 citations

  review
  PublisherDOI

• Predicting spatial familiarity by exploiting head and eye movements during pedestrian navigation in the real world

  Scientific Reports · 2025-03-07 · 4 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Spatial familiarity has seen a long history of interest in wayfinding research. To date, however, no studies have been done which systematically assess the behavioral correlates of spatial familiarity, including eye and body movements. In this study, we take a step towards filling this gap by reporting on the results of an in-situ, within-subject study with [Formula: see text] pedestrian wayfinders that combines eye-tracking and body movement sensors. In our study, participants were required to walk both a familiar route and an unfamiliar route by following auditory, landmark-based route instructions. We monitored participants' behavior using a mobile eye tracker, a high-precision Global Navigation Satellite System receiver, and a high-precision, head-mounted Inertial Measurement Unit. We conducted machine learning experiments using Gradient-Boosted Trees to perform binary classification, testing out different feature sets, i.e., gaze only, Inertial Measurement Unit data only, and a combination of the two, to classify a person as familiar or unfamiliar with a particular route. We achieve the highest accuracy of [Formula: see text] using exclusively Inertial Measurement Unit data, exceeding gaze alone at [Formula: see text], and gaze and Inertial Measurement Unit data together at [Formula: see text]. For the highest accuracy achieved, yaw and acceleration values are most important. This finding indicates that head movements ("looking around to orient oneself") are a particularly valuable indicator to distinguish familiar and unfamiliar environments for pedestrian wayfinders.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Wayfinding in pairs: comparing the planning and navigation performance of dyads and individuals in a real-world environment

  Cognitive Research Principles and Implications · 2024-06-21 · 6 citations

  articleOpen access

  Navigation is essential to life, and it is cognitively complex, drawing on abilities such as prospective and situated planning, spatial memory, location recognition, and real-time decision-making. In many cases, day-to-day navigation is embedded in a social context where cognition and behavior are shaped by others, but the great majority of existing research in spatial cognition has focused on individuals. The two studies we report here contribute to our understanding of social wayfinding, assessing the performance of paired and individual navigators on a real-world wayfinding task in which they were instructed to minimize time and distance traveled. In the first study, we recruited 30 pairs of friends (familiar dyads); in the second, we recruited 30 solo participants (individuals). We compare the two studies to the results of an earlier study of 30 pairs of strangers (unfamiliar dyads). We draw out differences in performance with respect to spatial, social, and cognitive considerations. Of the three conditions, solo participants were least successful in reaching the destination accurately on their initial attempt. Friends traveled more efficiently than either strangers or individuals. Working with a partner also appeared to lend confidence to wayfinders: dyads of either familiarity type were more persistent than individuals in the navigation task, even after encountering challenges or making incorrect attempts. Route selection was additionally impacted by route complexity and unfamiliarity with the study area. Navigators explicitly used ease of remembering as a planning criterion, and the resulting differences in route complexity likely influenced success during enacted navigation.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The symmetry and asymmetry of pedestrian route choice

  Journal of Environmental Psychology · 2023-03-31 · 8 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Collective Spatial Cognition

  2023-09-01 · 7 citations

  bookSenior author

  "This book integrates the science of spatial cognition and the science of team cognition to explore the social, psychological, and behavioral phenomenon of spatial cognition as it occurs in human collectives such as dyads and work teams. It represents the culmination of a process of outlining and defining a growing field of research termed Collective Spatial Cognition. It engages contributions from an international and multi-disciplinary community of scholars, who have collaborated to provide a foundation for knowledge discovery regarding how groups of people of varying size acquire information and solve problems involving spatiality as a key component, leading to action that incorporates the spatial information and problem-solving collectively achieved. The collectives under study can be as small as dyads (teams of two) to large teams-of-teams who are working alongside each other to complete a mutual goal. The book lays the foundation for multi- and interdisciplinary work regarding Collective Spatial Cognition in the years to come, and this book documents that foundation. This book will be of interest to those researching spatial, behavioural, cognitive, and information sciences in the fields of human geography, sociology, psychology, and computer science"

  PublisherDOI

• Another Look at the “Mercator Effect” on Global-Scale Cognitive Maps: Not in Areas but in Directions

  Annals of the American Association of Geographers · 2021 · 9 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Cartography
  • Geography

  The Mercator effect is the widespread and persistent belief among cartographers and others that people’s global-scale cognitive maps are distorted in a particular way because of their exposure to world maps displayed with the common Mercator projection. In particular, such exposure has been claimed to lead people to believe that polar regions, such as Greenland, are much larger than they really are, relative to equatorial regions. Recent studies, however, have found no evidence for a Mercator effect on recalled areas for world regions. Given that a version of the Mercator projection known as the Web Mercator has been used for Web mapping in the last couple of decades, we carried out a replication with samples at two universities, but we also asked respondents to estimate great-circle directions (“as a jet would fly”) from their home city to several other world cities. We again find no support for a Mercator effect on areas estimated from memory, but our novel collection of spherical direction estimates provides clear evidence of a Mercator effect (or that of a similar rectangular projection) on directional beliefs. These results confirm that cognitive maps are not unitary, analogue mental structures but collections of beliefs stored in different formats in separate mental structures that are not necessarily mutually coordinated and integrated. We also introduce a survey of map use that focuses on digital maps and their use for local versus global geographic inquiries.

  PublisherDOI

• Geographic orientation, disorientation, and misorientation: a commentary on Fernandez Velasco and Casati

  Spatial Cognition and Computation · 2020 · 10 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Cognitive psychology
  • Psychology

  In this commentary on Fernandez Velasco and Casati’s “Subjective Disorientation as a Metacognitive Feeling” in this journal, I take issue with their distinction between “the objective condition of being lost and the subjective condition of disorientation”. Instead, I argue that being lost is geographic disorientation, and in all cases, it depends on a person’s subjective awareness that they are uncertain about their location or proper course. This, in fact, provides a unified definition of geographic disorientation. In contrast, being objectively misplaced is misorientation instead of disorientation, and is conceptually, and often in practice, a distinct state of affairs.

  PublisherDOI

• The Role of Spatial Cognition inMedicine

  Psychology Press eBooks · 2020 · 91 citations

  • Psychology
  • Cognitive science
  • Cognitive psychology

  Spatial cognition is central to understanding medical images, including those produced by CT, MRI, X-Ray, and ultrasound. Zero-order correlations indicated that spatial ability measures were related to initial performance and persisted throughout the learning trials, despite the attenuation of individual differences in task performance. The admissions test used in dentistry schools in the United States includes a spatial abilities tests known as the Perceptual Aptitude Test, which includes items such as judging the relative sizes of angles, and imagining the folding and unfolding of pieces of paper. A follow-up study revealed that the effects of spatial ability can be moderated by the characteristics of the computer simulation. Spatial understanding was enhanced when learner-controlled rotation was permitted via a hand-held mouse. Research on learning anatomy also provides information about the nature of internal spatial representations of 3-D structures.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Mary Hegarty

  19 shared

• Sara Irina Fabrikant

  University of Zurich

  11 shared

• Anthony E. Richardson

  Saint Michael's College

  11 shared

• Madeleine Keehner

  7 shared

• Stacy Rebich-Hespanha

  National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis

  6 shared

• Reginald G. Golledge

  6 shared

• Sandrine Tien

  6 shared

• Paul C.Sutton

  6 shared

Labs

• Cognition, Perception, and Cognitive NeurosciencePI

Awards & honors

• Laura Lewis Awarded APA Fantz Memorial Award
• Karen Szumlinski Receives 2026 Distinguished Teaching Award