Monday, February 15, 2010

Science-Related Outside Events

Cognitive Science Seminar Schedule, Spring

The talks are at 4PM on Wednesdays in 430 FIT.

February 24: Speaker, Rob Isenhower; Hosted by Rick Dale

Rob Isenhower earned his BS in psychology from Clemson University in 2003. He is currently a PhD candidate at the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action at the University of Connecticut. His research interests include interpersonal coordination and affordance perception. He has examined differences in coordination between typically-developing children and those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. He has also examined how action-scaled information specifies the emergence of cooperation during social interaction. His dissertation, and main research interest, is aimed at providing an empirical and theoretical framework for understanding aspects of emotional experience from an ecological perspective. After providing a theoretical background and situating this problem within the broader context of perception, action, and cognition, his talk will focus on two studies that quantify the temporal structure of aspects of day-to-day emotional experience across shorter and longer time scales and on the coupling of affective states between persons.

March 3: Speaker, Anne Britt; Hosted by Loel Kim

Anne Britt is an associate professor in the Psychology Department at Northern Illinois University. She is a cognitive psychologist with an expertise in advanced literacy skills including argument comprehension, sourcing, and content integration. Over the past 8 years, she has conducted basic research to better understand the processes required when students comprehend, evaluate, and produce written arguments. Based on this research, she and her colleagues have created CASE (Cultivating Argument Skills Efficiently) which is a set of web-based argument modules to provide instruction and practice to improve argumentation skills (funded by the Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education). These modules have been found to be effective in teaching argument comprehension, evaluation, and production skills. Prior to CASE, she co-developed the Sourcers Apprentice and Sourcers Apprentice Intelligent Feedback (SAIF) with support from the McDonnell Foundation. The Sourcers Apprentice is a computer-based environment for teaching sourcing and content integration skills and SAIF provides individualized feedback on the essays produced in Sourcers Apprentice. She has received approximately $3.3 million in federally funded grants to examine higher-order literacy skills. Britt has numerous publications in these areas and has served on the expert panel to develop the OECD-sponsored PIAAC international survey of adult literacy for Problem Solving.

March 17: Speaker, Roger Azevedo

Dr. Azevedo is a tenured Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology and an affiliated member of the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis. He received his doctorate in Educational Psychology and Applied Cognitive Science from McGill University in 1998. He is the Director of the Cognitive Psychology Area and the Director of the Cognition and Technology Research Laboratory. His main research interests are in metacognition and self-regulated learning, complex learning, human and computerized tutoring, and intelligent computer-based learning environments. In addition to publishing over 100 articles in journals, book chapters, and conference proceedings, he has played a major role in bringing in over $8 million in grant funding during the last eleven years as either PI or Co-PI on NSF and NIH grants that test the effectiveness of intelligent tutoring systems for medical and biological sciences. He has received several awards including the prestigious NSF Early Career Award. He is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association. He is an Associate Editor of the Journal of Educational Psychology and a member of editorial board of several top-tiered journals. He serves on several national and international review panels (NSF, IES) and conference program committees (International AI and Education). He is an advisory board member of the Pittsburgh Science of Learning Center.

March 24: Speaker, Istvan Berkeley; Hosted by Roxanne Raine

Istvan S. N. Berkeley (Ph.D., 1997, University of Alberta) is an associate professor at The University of Louisiana at Lafayette. He is cross-appointed in the Institute of Cognitive Science (ICS) and the Philosophy Program, in addition to having an affiliation with the Center for Advanced Computer Studies (CACS). His main research interests concentrate on the interface between philosophy and cognitive science, with particular focus on the foundations of cognitive science and issues concerning representation and embodied cognition. His research frequently employs computational methods to address philosophical conundrums. His work has been published in journals such as Minds and Machines, Connection Science and Philosophical Psychology.

March 31: Speaker, Robert Atkinson; Hosted by Scotty Craig

Dr. Robert Atkinson is an Associate Professor of Educational Technology at Arizona State University. His research explores the intersection of cognitive science, instructional design, and educational technology. His scholarship involves the design of instructional material—including book- and computer-based learning environments—according to our understanding of human cognitive architecture and how to leverage its unique constraints and affordances. His current research foci include contributing to an empirically grounded theoretical framework for using worked-out examples to support initial cognitive skill acquisition in well-structured domains, studying flow/engagement within games, and the design of multimedia learning environments that incorporate animated pedagogical agents. He has obtained—both independently and collaboratively—over $20 million dollars in grant support from a variety of sources including the National Science Foundation, Office of Naval Research, and the Intel Corporation. His research appears in a variety of highly respected academic journals including Journal of Educational Psychology, Applied Cognitive Psychology, Learning and Instruction, Review of Educational Research, and Educational Psychologist. He currently serves on the editorial boards of five top-tier journals and is a standing member of the Institute of Education Sciences review panel.

April 7: Speaker, Michele I. Feist; Hosted by Roxanne Raine

Michele I. Feist is presently an Assistant Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. She received a B.A. in Spanish Literature from Northwestern University in 1991 and a Ph.D. in Linguistics from Northwestern University in 2000, after which she was a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Psychology Department at Northwestern University. Dr. Feist’s primary research interests are in lexical semantics and in language and cognition, with a particular focus on the language of space.

April 14: Speaker, David Edelman; Hosted by Stan Franklin

David Edelman is an Associate Fellow in Experimental Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute, an independent, not-for-profit scientific research organization dedicated to understanding how the human brain works at the most fundamental level. His two main areas of study at the Institute are the neural correlates of consciousness in non-human animals and the dynamic properties of mitochondria in neurons of the central nervous system. With his colleague, Dr. Anil Seth of the University of Sussex, Dr. Edelman has recently laid out a framework for the study of animal consciousness that suggests that certain fundamental properties of conscious states are amenable to study and may in fact be present in widely different phyla, from cephalopod molluscs to humans. Currently, Dr. Edelman is working with Dr. Graziano Fiorito of the Stazione Zoologica Anton Dohrn (Naples, IT) to characterize octopus visual perception using a psychophysical approach, in combination with neurophysiological recording in free behaving animals. Dr. Edelman’s cellular research concerns how mitochondria are transported throughout neurons, how these organelles are distributed in particular regions of cells (e.g., axon terminals) during different brain states, such as those underlying learning and the stages of sleep, and more generally, the link between mitochondrial trafficking and neural function. Dr. Edelman earned his B.A. in Sociology and Anthropology from Swarthmore College and his Ph.D. in Physical Anthropology, with a specialization in paleoanthropology, from the University of Pennsylvania. From 1997 to 2005, he was a postdoctoral fellow at both the Scripps Research Institute (La Jolla, California) and the Neurosciences Institute.

April 21: Speaker, Cristina Conati; Hosted by Art Graesser

Cristina Conati is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of British Columbia. She received a “Laurea” degree (M.Sc. equivalent) in Computer Science at the University of Milan, Italy (1988), as well as a M.Sc. (1996) and Ph.D. (1999) in Intelligent Systems at the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of research include User Modeling, Adaptive Interfaces, Intelligent Tutoring Systems and Affective Computing. Cristina has published over 50 strictly referred articles, and her work has received awards from the International Conference on User Modeling, the International Conference of AI in Education, the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces and the Journal of User Modeling and User Adapted Interaction. She was Program Co-Chair for User Modeling 200, and Conference Co-Chair for Intelligent User Interfaces 2009.

April 28: Speaker, James Russell; Hosted by Sidney D’Mello

Dr. James Russell is the Chair of the Department of Psychology at Boston College. His research centers on human emotion. His interest began with the question of how large-scale environments (such as homes, offices, malls) and social events (chatting with a friend, working with a team) influence emotion and thereby influence various activities and outcomes. This led to the fundamental question of how emotions can be described and then assessed. Some specific ideas pursued are a circumplex model of emotion, a prototype theory of emotion concepts, which leads to the idea that specific emotions are understood in terms of scripts, a defense of the traditional view that displeasure is the opposite of pleasure, a skeptical review of the traditional view that basic emotions are universally and easily recognized from facial expressions. More recently, the question has arisen of how these various ideas fit together within a larger framework. An analysis is being developed called "the psychological construction of emotion.". Dr. Russell received his PhD from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1974.

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