Barbara Landau (Johns Hopkins University)

Barbara Landau has been the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science since 2001, was the Vice Provost for Faculty from 2011-2014, and was the Director of the Science of Learning Institute from 2013-2018. Landau is interested in human knowledge of language and space, and the relationships between these two foundational systems of knowledge. Her central interests concern the nature of the cognitive "primitives" that are in place during early development, and support our remarkable capacity to recognize objects, move around space in a directed fashion, and talk about our spatial experience. Specific questions of interest include: How do children come to master the intricate relationships between meanings and their linguistic expression? How do we come to know about space, in order to recognize and remember objects, motions, and places in space? What is the relationship between language and space, and do these differ across different languages? How do humans use each system to enhance their use of the other system? When and how do the two systems come to "communicate" with each other? Landau is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Cognitive Science Society, and several other organizations. She was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 2009.