Sally Doherty Jensen is a research consultant.  She began her career as an elementary school teacher in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where one of her undertakings was to work with a small group of teachers to design an environmental studies program intended to increase children’s understanding and appreciation of the island environment they live in. As a classroom teacher, the question she became interested is how humans learn.   She received her Masters degree and Ph.D. in Education at UC Santa Barbara with concentrations in developmental psychology, cognitive psychology and statistics.  Her dissertation, “Developmental Differences in Scene Recognition at Spatial Decision Points” was part of a large-scale study of spatial cognition directed by James Pellegrino and Reginald Golledge.  She then spent a number of years as a professional researcher first at the UC Santa Barbara Center for Cognitive Science Research and then at The Salk Institute for Biological Studies where she investigated the neural bases of learning and cognition.  For the last five years, she worked as an Associate Professor of Research at U.S. International University where she taught courses in research design and evaluation and directed doctoral students’ dissertation research in the Department of Education.   Currently, she is a full-time consultant.

The following ten journal articles are representative of the spatial cognitive research that she has been involved in with the interdisciplinary team of researchers at UC Santa Barbara:

Spatial Knowledge Acquisition by Children: Route Learning and Relational Distances.  (with R.G. Golledge, N. Gale, & J.W. Pellegrino).  Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 1992, 82(2), 223-244.

Acquisition and Integration of Route Knowledge.  (with R.G. Golledge, J.W. Pellegrino, & N. Gale).  In R.P.B. Singh (Ed.)   National Geographic Journal of India: Special Issue on Spatial Context of Behavior-Environment Interaction, 1991, 37 (1-2).

Acquisition of Route and Survey Knowledge in the Absence of Vision.  (with R.L. Klatzky, J.M. Loomis, R.G. Golledge, J.G. Cicinelli,  J.W. Pellegrino).  Journal of Motor Behavior, 1990, 22 (1), 19-43.

The Acquisition and Integration of Route Knowledge in an Unfamiliar Neighborhood Environment.  (with N. Gale, R.G. Golledge, & J.W. Pellegrino).  Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1990, 10, 13-25.

Children Versus Adults’ Knowledge of Places and Distances in A Familiar Neighborhood Environment.  (with N. Gale, J.W. Pellegrino, & R.G. Golledge).  Children’s Environments Quarterly, 1989, 6 (2-3).

Can You Squeeze a Tomato: The Role of Motor Representations in Semantic Sensibility Judgments.  (with R.L. Klatzky, J.W. Pellegrino, and B. McCloskey).  Journal of Memory and Language, 1989, 28 (1).

Hand Configuration and Object Processing.  (with R.L. Klatzky, B. McCloskey, J.W. Pellegrino, and T.R. Smith).  Journal of Motor Behavior, 1987, 19 (2).

Towards Reassembling the Image.  (with N.Gale, J.W. Pellegrino, and R.G. Golledge).  Children’s Environments Quarterly, 1985, 2 (3).

Developmental Changes in Neighborhood Scene Knowledge.  (with J.W. Pellegrino).  Children’s Environments Quarterly, 1985, 2 (3).

A Conceptual Model and Empirical Analysis of Children’s Acquisition of Spatial Knowledge.  (with R.G. Golledge, T.R. Smith, J.W. Pellegrino, & S.P. Marshall).  Journal of Environmental Psychology, 1985, 5.