5 Darkness and the Imagination: The Role of Environment in the Development of Spiritual Beliefs

Holley Moyes is a Professor of Anthropology and Heritage Studies and Affiliate Faculty in the Cognitive and Information Sciences department at the University of California, Merced, USA. Her main area of expertise is the archaeology of religion and she is particularly interested in ritual spaces. Although most of her fieldwork is conducted in ancient Maya ritual cave sites in Belize, Central America, her broader interests encompass cross-cultural ritual cave use. She has published over 40 journal articles and book chapters on the subject of caves, and her 2012 volume, Sacred Darkness: A Global Perspective on the Ritual Use of Caves, won a 2013 Choice Award for Outstanding Academic Title.

Lillian Rigoli holds a BSc in Cognitive and Information Sciences from the University of California, Merced, USA, and an MA in Experimental Psychology from the University of Cincinnati, USA. She is currently a PhD student at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, in the Department of Psychology. Her research investigates multi-agent behavioural dynamics during cooperative and competitive tasks, and the interaction between artificial agents and humans.

Stephanie Huette is an Associate Professor in Psychology at the University of Memphis and an affiliate of the Institute for Intelligent Systems, the University’s interdisciplinary research centre. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the University of California, Merced’s Center for Climate Change Communication. Her current research centres on language processing, and on how real-world contexts affect our understanding of meaning in the moment, and over longer timescales. She has published work in scientific journals on linguistic negation, grammatical processing, eye movements, hand movements, and gestures, as well as visual processing.

Daniel R. Montello is Professor of Geography and Affiliated Professor of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, USA, where he has been on the faculty since 1992. His educational background is in environmental, cognitive, and developmental psychology. His research is in the areas of spatial, environmental, and geographic perception, cognition, affect, and behaviour. Dan has published over 100 articles and chapters concerning spatial cognition, cognition in geography and cartography, behavioral geography, environmental psychology, and geographic information science. He has also co-authored or edited seven books, including Handbook of Behavioral and Cognitive Geography (Elgar, 2018) and Space in Mind: Concepts for Spatial Learning and Education (MIT Press, 2014) (co-edited with Karl Grossner and Donald G. Janelle). He currently co-edits the academic journal Spatial Cognition and Computation.

Teenie Matlock is the McClatchy Chair of Communications and Founding Faculty in the Cognitive and Information Sciences Program at the University of California, Merced, USA, and the Founding Director of the Center for Climate Communication. She is also Affiliate Faculty with the Institute of Cognitive and Information Sciences at UC Berkeley. She has published over 75 articles, including a number of articles on metaphorical language and reasoning. Her main areas of expertise include semantics, metaphor, spatial language, political language, and gesture. She is Associate Editor of the journal Cognitive Linguistics, and serves on the Cognitive Science Society governing board. She is a standing member of the National Institutes of Health’s Language and Communication study section.

Michael J. Spivey has been a Professor of Cognitive Science at University of California, Merced, USA, since 2008. He is a recipient of Sigma Xi’s William Procter Prize for Scientific Achievement, and several teaching awards. He has published over 100 journal articles and book chapters in a variety of subfields within cognitive science, showing evidence that a mind is the combined result of activity in the brain, the body, and the environment. His dynamical-systems account of perception and cognition is detailed in his books, The Continuity of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Who You Are (MIT Press, 2020).