Mary Hegarty

Mary Hegarty is Professor Emerita of Psychological & Brain Sciences at UC Santa Barbara. She served as Director of ReCVEB from 2018 through June 2026. Her research examines spatial thinking in complex activities such as comprehension, reasoning, and problem solving. In studies of mechanical reasoning and the interpretation of graphics, she uses eye-tracking data to investigate how people understand visual-spatial displays, including diagrams, graphs, and maps, and draw inferences from them. Her work combines experimental methods with the study of individual differences in spatial cognition, including navigation, environmental learning, mental rotation, and perspective taking. She has also studied the roles of internal and external visualization in reasoning about mechanical systems, weather patterns, and molecular structures, as well as the use of visual versus analytic strategies in scientific problem solving.