Areas of Emphasis

The Cognitive Area encompasses four broad areas and emphasizes both laboratory research and cognitive modeling in each:

Memory and Cognition

Memory and cognition covers core areas in cognition psychology and cognitive neuroscience including memory, learning, attention, categorization, decision making, implicit memory, neural network modeling, aging, and various impairments in memory. One primary focus is the use of quantitative models to understand processing and representation in memory. In addition, along with some faculty in the quantitative area, there is a focus on modeling the time course of processing.

Perception

You will pursue courses and participate in research on a variety of aspects of visual and auditory perception and attention. Topics range from psychophysics, information processing, attention, and ecological perception, to those concerned with speech.

Language and Speech

Language and speech covers core areas such as speech perception and production, reading, sentence processing, syntax, spoken and visual word recognition, memory for text and discourse, corpus analysis as well as computational modeling of several of these domains. This area has close ties to excellent programs in several other departments: linguistics including computational linguistics, computer science, and speech and hearing.

Human Performance

Human performance incorporates aspects of the other subareas from a perspective grounded in engineering psychology. You will encounter the newest research on topics in perceptual-motor coordination, human decision-making, attention and visual performance. If your career interests include human factors engineering, your training can be coordinated with the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering.

Cognitive Modeling

This is a concentration that allows bridging between the cognitive area and other areas that focus on modeling. The aim is to provide flexibility for a student to design their own progam of study that develops both quantitative skills and basic knowledge in the content area of interest. Quantitative skills are broadly defined and can include any of the topics covered in the quantitative program in the Psychology department or in other departments (e.g., mathematics, computer science, statistics, linguistics, physics, and so  on). More information is available here.

Cognitive Development

Several of the cognitive area faculty are jointly appointed in the developmental area. Students can enroll in the cognitive program with their primary research focus in cognitive development, including development of language, numerosity, categorization, memory, and development of concepts.