Statement of Purpose
Typically, complex adaptive system models are applied to natural phenomena, such as the pattern of stripes on zebras or seeds on sunflowers. Our research goal is to apply these models to understanding how individual people learn and perceive, and how groups of people organize themselves into emergent structures which none of the individuals in the group may understand or even perceive. Our laboratory is currently exploring interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning, methods for learning abstract concepts using computer simulations, the perception of similarity and analogy, and group behavior from a complex systems perspective. Our typical modus operandi is to simultaneously conduct psychological experiments on humans and develop computational models of the observed behavior. The results from the experiments help to constrain and inform our computational models, and the computational models serve to organize and explain our empirical results.
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Participate in our On-line, Interactive Experiments on Collective Behavior
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Lab Kudos
- 10 July, 2008: Georg Theiner successfully defends his dissertation "From Extended Minds to Group Minds: Rethinking the Boundaries of the Mental." Georg will be a postdoctoral research fellow at University of Alberta in the Fall of 2008
- 8 July, 2008: Michael Roberts successfully defends his dissertation "Human Collective Behavior." Michael will be beginning life as an Assistant Professor at DePauw University in the Fall of 2008
- 25 June, 2008: Dr. David Landy wins the Winner of the 2008 American Psychological Association Division of Experimental Psychology Young Investigator Award for the article Landy, D., & Goldstone, R. L. (2007). How abstract is symbolic thought? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition, 33, 720-733
- 15 May, 2007: David Baldwin is awarded a National Science Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship for the project "Finding Analogies Within Systems"
- 30 July, 2007: Dr. Ji Son successfully defends her dissertation: "Forces of contextualization and decontextualization: A look at symbols, experiences, and language"
- 1 August, 2007: David Landy wins the Marr Prize for Best Student Paper at the 29th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, for his paper "Grounding Symbol Structures in Space: Formal Notations as Diagrams."
- 23 August, 2007: David Landy successfully defends his dissertation: "Formal Notations as Diagrams of Abstract Structure"
- 1 December, 2007: Post-doctoral research scientist Todd Gureckis leaves us to start his position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University
Research is generously supported by:
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The National Science Foundation, Research on Learning and Education program |
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The Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences |