Cognitive Psychology Program Overview
Cognition is thought, and cognitive psychologists investigate the what, where, when, how, and why of thinking, and how those aspects pertain to human and animal behavior.
Cognition involves attention, perception, memory, brain physiology, reasoning, language, decision making, and many other areas that cognitive psychologists actively study.
Experimental Laboratory: The TC3 Lab (Team Cognition, Culture, and Communication Lab)
Dr. Douglas Gillan, Principal Investigator
Cristin McDonald (left), undergraduate research assistant, and Gina Egler, graduate research assistant, remotely monitor a three-person team from the control room of the TC3 lab (also shown at right).
Audio and video are continuously recorded during experiments, which last two days, four hours per day. The Army Research Institute sponsors this study, which is a simulation of international peacekeeping.
A team discusses their first of eight simulated peacekeeping missions that are based in Bosnia. Their communication is recorded and run through a speech recognition website developed by Melanie Martin, PhD. student in Computer Science, and a Latent Semantic Analysis is subsequently conducted, a program developed by Dr. Peter Foltz, one of the principal investigators on the TC3 project. Dr. Adrienne Lee and Dr. Douglas Gillan are principal investigators on the project as well. There are currently ten graduate students and two undergraduate research assistants gaining valuable experience on the project.
Program Details
The Cognitive Program emphasizes:
- The information processing approach to the study of human behavior
- Computational modeling
- The application of the data and methodologies of cognitive psychology to real-world problems
- Cognitive neuroscience
Many of the ongoing research programs are investigating the role of perception and memory in the comprehension of written and spoken language.
Other areas of specialization include:
- knowledge representation
- brain mechanisms underlying cognition
- attention
- human-computer interaction
We encourage our students to take advantage of the department's other strengths in Engineering and Social Psychology. Many of our students further diversify their skills by taking internships.