The Academic Minute from 05.09 – 05.13
Monday, May 9th
William Warren – Brown University
Studying Human “Flocking” to Understand Collective Behavior
Bill Warren is Chancellor’s Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University, and President of the International Society for Ecological Psychology. He pioneered the use of virtual reality (VR) techniques to study perception and action in interactive experiments. He has published over 130 articles and chapters on the visual control of locomotion, spatial navigation, collective behavior of crowds, and dynamic visual-motor tasks like bouncing a ball on a racket. His current project is creating a visual pedestrian model that can explain the motion of individuals and crowds through complex environments. His research has applications to social robotics, assistive technology, architectural design and evacuation planning.
Tuesday, May 10th
Mary Carskadon – Brown University
Adolescence, School, and Sleep
Mary A. Carskadon, PhD is an authority on adolescent sleep and circadian rhythms. Dr. Carskadon serves as director of the Chronobiology and Sleep Research Laboratory at Bradley Hospital and is a Professor of Psychiatry & Human Behavior at the Alpert Medical School. Dr. Carskadon is also director of a COBRE Center for Sleep and Circadian Rhythms in Child and Adolescent Mental Health. She is a distinguished alumna and honorary degree-holder of Gettysburg College and holds an earned doctorate in neuro- and bio-behavioral sciences from Stanford University, with a specialty in sleep research. Dr. Carskadon has received awards from several national organizations recognizing her scientific, educational, and public policy contributions including the AASM Nathaniel Kleitman Distinguished Service and Mark O Hatfield Public Policy Awards; the Outstanding Educator and Distinguished Scientist Awards of the Sleep Research Society. She is an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Wednesday, May 11th
Oriel FeldmanHall – Brown University
How Do We Figure Out The Hidden Motives of Others?
Oriel FeldmanHall is the Alfred Manning Assistant Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. She received the Benefactor Scholarship for her Doctorate at the University of Cambridge, United Kingdom, and her Bachelor of Arts from Cornell University. Dr. FeldmanHall has won numerous awards, including the Association for Psychological Science (APS) Rising Star Award, the Henry Merritt Wriston Award for excellence in teaching and scholarship, the Society for Neuroeconomics (SNE) Early Career Award, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) Young Investigator Award for outstanding contributions to science, the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions, and the American Psychological Association (APA) Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career Contribution to Psychology. She is an editor at multiple journals, including the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General and the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Thursday, May 12th
Hwamee Oh – Brown University
Why Some Brain Regions and Cognitive Functions Are More Vulnerable to Aging
Dr. Hwamee Oh is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Human Behavior and Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University. Dr. Oh received her PhD in Biopsychology (with a concentration in Human Cognitive Neuroscience) at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. During her postdoctoral training in Dr. William Jagust’s laboratory in Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute at UC-Berkeley, she studied cognitive, structural, and functional alterations in preclinical older adults with β-amyloid deposition, a pathological hallmark of Alzheimer’s disease, using multimodal human neuroimaging methods and cognitive/experimental approaches.
Friday, May 13th
Steven Sloman – Brown University
Bringing Evidence to Bear Without Understanding
Steven Sloman has worked at Brown University since 1992 after receiving his PhD in Psychology from Stanford University. He is ex-Editor-in-Chief of one of cognitive science’s primary journals, Cognition. Steve studies how people think. He has studied how our habits of thought influence the way we see the world, how the different systems that constitute thought interact to produce conclusions, conflict, and conversation, and how our construal of how the world works influences how we evaluate events and decide what actions to take. In 2005, he published the book Causal Models: How We Think About the World and Its Alternatives with Oxford University Press. After discovering some of the limits of human’s ability to reason causally and recognizing the importance of those limits to political discourse, he started studying the determinants of people’s attitudes.
