KEVIN CLARK, NGA OFFICE OF CORPORATE COMMUNICATIONSBrooklyn, New York, native Joeanna Arthur grew up thinking she would be a lawyer. A high school advanced-placement psychology class changed her course—the first of many reorientations that would eventually lead her to the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) in Springfield, Virginia.
Arthur had planned to go into clinical practice, but a neuropsychology course during her undergraduate years at Adelphi University on Long Island altered her goals again: she would be a neuroscientist.
As a PhD candidate at George Washington University in Washington, DC, Arthur studied how people use cognitive functions to orient themselves. “I tested healthy college undergrads, spinning them around and blindfolding them,” she recalls. “I felt like Dr. Evil.”
She showed that allowing people to look at their surroundings before being blindfolded and rotated while seated in a chair helped them to answer more consistently when asked to identify how far they had turned, although the average accuracy of their assessments remained about the same.1
“Your memory of the environment before you get the ...
