ABOUT THIS KIND OF RESEARCH

How do we think, reason and remember? And how do these and other cognitive abilities develop over a person's lifespan? The study of cognition and cognitive development at Brown involves work on a diverse set of issues, including inference, decision-making, memory, and visual cognition. We have particular strength in the area of categorization, with researchers working on questions in adults such as: How do people use their knowledge about categories to make inferences about unknown properties, how does the description of a category affect judgments about that category, what is the relation between how people name and how they think about categories, how is expertise with specific visual categories is acquired, and what neural substrates support visual categorization at different levels and across different modalities. From a developmental perspective researchers at Brown are addressing questions such as: How do infants and young children acquire categories, what types of categories can children learn at different points in development, and how do children acquire understanding of names for things, actions, and qualities. Other specific questions currently being worked on at Brown include: How does the set of options offered a decision maker influence their decisions? What can different patterns of memory deficits observed in patients with different types of brain damage tell us about the cognitive and neural structure of normal memory? How do children coordinate inferences about listener knowledge with their use of language. These questions are being addressed using a variety highly novel, as well as traditional, methodologies, including eye-tracking in both children and adults, preferential looking procedures in infants, neuropsychological assessment, fMRI, and behavioral studies combined with formal modeling, as well as neural-network modeling.

FACULTY INVOLVED

• James Anderson
  Research: Applications of neural networks for learning and memory and mathematical models for cognition.
  
  Graduate programs: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences; Neuroscience
   
• Rebecca Burwell
  Research: Neuroanatomical and electrophysiological approaches to examining the contribution of parahippocampal regions to memory and cognitive functions.
  
  Graduate programs: Neuroscience; Psychology
   
• Ruth Colwill
  Research: Animal learning and behavior, animal cognition and communication.
  
  Graduate program: Neuroscience
   
• Fulvio Domini
  Research: 3D shape perception, motion, depth perception, computational vision.
  
  Graduate program: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
  
   
• William Heindel
  Research: Neuropsychology of human learning and memory.
  
  Graduate programs: Psychology; Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
   
• Rachel Herz
  Research: Olfactory cognition and perception and the role of emotion, context and genetics.
  
  Graduate program: Psychology
   
• Martin Keller
  Research: Investigations of the short-and long-term course of psychiatric illnesses - particularly mood and anxiety disorders - and the effect of different neuropsychopharmacological and psychotherapeutic treatments upon the course of these illnesses in humans.
  
  Graduate programs: Neurology; Psychiatry
   
• Benjamin Kimia
  Research: The computational and perceptual aspects of recovery and representing of shape of objects for such tasks as object recognition and construction of brain atlases.
  
  Graduate program: Engineering
   
• David Laidlaw
  Research: Biological imaging, visualization, modeling and computation.
  
  Graduate program: Computer Science
   
• Phil Lieberman
  Research: Language and thought in an evolutionary context.
  
  Graduate program: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
   
• James Morgan
  Research: Infant speech perception, language acquisition, psycholinguistics, learnability.
  
  Graduate program: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
   
• Michael Paradiso
  Research: The neural basis of visual perception.
  
  Graduate programs: Neuroscience; Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences
  
   
• Jerome Sanes
  Research: Neural information processing in voluntary behavior.
  
  Graduate program: Neuroscience
   
• David Sheinberg
  Research: Neural mechanisms of natural vision.
  
  Graduate program: Neuroscience
   
• Steven Sloman
  Research: Human reasoning, categorization, and decision making.
  
  Graduate programs: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences; Psychology
  
  
• David Sobel
  Research: Casual learning and inference throughout development. Theory of mind. Conceptual development.
  
  Garduate program: Cognitive & Linguistic Sciences