National Science Board recommends renewal of TDLC for 5 years
At the February 2011 meeting of the National Science Board, the governing body of the National Science Foundation, the TDLC was approved for renewal for five year of additional funding: "RESOLVED that the National Science Board authorize the Director, at his discretion, to make
an award to the University of California, San Diego for the Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center (TDLC) for an amount not to exceed $18,840,000 over 60 months."
Real-world birding expertise project now online
We have begun a new project recruiting and testing birding experts from around the country and beyond. After months of development and pilot testing, our web site for online tests of perceptual expertise is now up and running:
expertise.psy.vanderbilt.edu. After just a few weeks, with only cursory recruitment efforts, we have had well over 50 participants. Mike Mack deserves all the credit for his hard work putting this site together.
As part of this project, we have also created a new blog called This is Your Brain on Birds. Our goal is to share some of the past and current scientific findings with the birding community and other interested readers, as well as reflect on the insights of birders and their unique expertise. We hope that this blog will also serve as a gateway to interest and encourage even more birders to participate in our online experiments.
New papers from the CatLab
Mack, M.L., Richler, J.J., Gauthier, I., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Indecision on decisional separability. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review.
Folstein, J., Gauthier, I., & Palmeri, T.J. (2010). Mere exposure alters
category learning of novel objects. Frontiers in Cognitive Science.
Neurons Cast Votes to Guide Decision-Making
A new paper published in Psychological Review by Purcell, Palmeri
and colleagues is highlighted in this Vanderbilt news story: http://news.vanderbilt.edu/2010/10/neurons-cast-votes-to-guide-decision-making/
New GPU Cluster Funded by Grants from NSF and Vanderbilt
Palmeri is a co-PI on grants recently funded by NSF and Vanderbilt to create a GPU computational cluster at Vanderbilt. GPU’s promise 10-100 fold speedups in simulations of computational models developed by the lab. For more information on this project, check out this recent new article: http://www.vanderbilt.edu/myvu/news/2010/07/29/more-computer-power-for-university.120764
New papers from the CatLab
Mack, M.L., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Decoupling object detection and categorization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance.
Mack, M.L., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Modeling categorization of scenes containing consistent versus inconsistent objects. Journal of Vision.
Nelson, M.J., Boucher, L., Logan, G.D., Palmeri, T.J., Schall, J.D. (in press). Impact of nonstationary response time in stopping and stepping saccade tasks. Attention, Perception, & Performance.
Purcell, B.A., Heitz, R.P., Cohen, J.Y., Schall, J.D., Logan, G.D., & Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Neurally-constrained modeling of perceptual decision making. Psychological Review.
Gauthier, I., Wong, A.C.-N., Palmeri, T.J. (in press). Manipulating visual experience: Comment on Op de Beeck and
Baker. Trends in Cognitive Science.
Congratulations Dr. Richler!
Jennifer Richler, co-advised by Gauthier and Palmeri, successfully passed her doctoral dissertation defense today. Her thesis is entitled "Automaticity of basic-level categorization accounts for naming effects in recognition memory". Congratulations Dr. Richler! Now you get to learn the ultra-secret, very special handshake.
Michael Mack wins travel grant from Cognitive Science Society
Mike Mack won a $500 travel grant from the Cognitive Science Society to its meeting in Amsterdam this July. He presented a paper entitled Recognizing Scenes Containing Consistent
or Inconsistent Objects. Congratulations Mike.
Palmeri, Logan, and Schall awarded Chancellor’s Award for Research
At the Fall Faculty Assembly, Gordon Logan, Thomas Palmeri, and Jeff Schall were awarded a Chancellor’s Award for Research for the theoretical and empirical work summarized in their 2007 Psychological Review paper. Their research has combined behavioral, electrophysiological, and computational methods to test and refine alternative models of the inhibitory control processes that are recruited during the stop-signal paradigm. It is very important to acknowledge additionally Leanne Boucher, who clearly has played a very central role in this line of work.
Alan Wong’s Dissertation Research Highlight
A paper out of Alan Wong’s recent dissertation has been highlighted by Vanderbilt Exploration and the UPI.
Wong, A.C.-N., Palmeri, T.J., & Gauthier I. (in press). Conditions for face-like expertise with objects: Becoming a Ziggerin expert – but which type? Psychological Science.