The Workshop Program for ‘Spatial Cognition and Spatial Communication in Ageing’ is Now Available
We are pleased to announce that the full conference Program is now available! We invite you to explore our lineup of inspiring keynote talks, engaging sessions and social events designed to spark ideas and foster connections.
*Please note that Interpretations from English to International Sign (IS) and IS to English will be provided throughout the event.
Keynote Speakers
Albert Postma, Helmholtz Institute, Experimental Psychology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
Albert Postma is professor in Clinical Neuropsychology and head of the Psychology Department, Utrecht University. Over the past three decades, his research has focused on spatial cognition and human memory in both healthy and brain damaged individuals. Much of this work has been inspired by the EU NEST Fp6 program “Finding your way in the world – on the neurocognitive basis of spatial memory and orientation in humans” for which Albert Postma was coordinator. Another line of his research focuses on multisensory space and what happens to spatial cognitive abilities after sensory deprivation (blindness; deafness).
Abstract
Elderly persons and neurological patients face severe difficulties in finding their way in today’s dynamic world. One manner to support these groups in their navigation challenges consists of offering dedicated route learning training. I will present the outcomes of an errorless route learning training in Korsakoff patients, who suffer severe amnesia and lack in autonomy (Postma, et al. 2025). Rather than training the spatial mind and brain, another method to support wayfinding activities is to identify which features of the outside world are important for allowing vulnerable elderly to safely take a walk on their own. In studies currently in progress we have interviewed professional and informal caretakers of elderly persons that are in the initial phase of dementia on which route features help their clients and family members in spatial orientation during a walk and which mobility obstacles are encountered. The outcome of this work might give guidelines for hospital and city planning.
Linda Smith, Indiana University Bloomington, USA
Linda B. Smith is a distinguished professor at Indiana University Bloomington. Taking a complex systems perspective, she seeks to understand the interdependencies among perceptual, motor and cognitive developments during the first three years of post-natal life. Using wearable sensors, including head-mounted cameras, she studies how the young learner’s own behavior creates the statistical structure of the learning environments. Smith received her PhD from the University of Pennsylvania in 1977 and immediately joined the faculty at Indiana University. She won the David E. Rumelhart Prize for Theoretical Contributions to Cognitive Science, the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Scientific Contributions, the William James Fellow Award from the American Psychological Society, and the Koffka Medal. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences.
Abstract
Much of the information in the world is latent, not revealed without some action by the perceiver. What we see, for example, depends on our posture, on where we turn our heads and eyes, what we do with our hands, where we move and how we move. Each behavior also depends on what we done, what we have seen (or heard) in distant past, moments ago, and in the current input. In this talk, I will present findings on the daily life experiences from 3 weeks to 24 months at multiple timescales: years, months, episodes of experience, and at the level of fractions of a second . I will also consider the statistics of experience at multiple levels of analysis from the sensory to the semantic. The focus will be on the development of spatial concepts, including shape and containment.
Beyza Sümer, University of Amsterdam, NL
Beyza Sümer is an assistant professor of Linguistics at the University of Amsterdam and a researcher at the Amsterdam Center for Language and Communication. Her research investigates how language modality shapes the relationship between spatial cognition and language, with a particular focus on sign languages, iconicity, and multimodal communication. She studies how spatial meaning is expressed and learned across different populations, including deaf signers, late language learners, and hearing learners of sign languages. Her work combines experimental methods, corpus analysis, and cross-modal comparisons to better understand how humans map spatial experience onto language.
Abstract
Sign languages provide a unique window into how form and meaning can be linked through iconic mappings between linguistic structure and human experience. In this talk, I explore how iconicity shapes language across different domains in sign language. First, I discuss iconicity at the lexical level and how it influences the learning and production of signs across different populations, including early and late signers, hearing learners of sign language, and signers with aphasia. I then turn to spatial language, where iconic mappings interact with spatial cognition and show different effects across spatial relations and across native and late learners. Together, these findings illustrate the multiple roles iconicity plays in language learning and spatial communication.
