Affective valence influences both our cognition and our perception of the world. For example, the speed and quality with which we recognize objects in a …
Making decisions often requires quick and intuitive assessments of the likelihood of unobserved events. People make such judgments with little effort, quickly and systematically. The …
Spatial context is known to affect how a stimulus is perceived. A variety of illusions spanning all visual modalities have been attributed to contextual processing, …
A wealth of research shows how the dopaminergic frontostriatal system incrementally learns from<br/> rewards and punishments. Midbrain dopamine cells show phasic firing rate changes in …
Preterm children are at risk for language delays and deficits. By 2 years, very preterm/low birthweight children tend to have smaller vocabularies and use less …
The last two decades in Cognitive Science have seen the productive application of Causal Graphical Models (Pearl, 2000; Spirtes, Glymour & Scheines, 1993) to theories …
Abstract of “Enhancing Visual Perceptual Learning Through Reward and Sleep” by Aaron V. Berard, Ph.D., Brown University, May 2016 Visual perceptual learning (VPL) is defined …
Recognizing the content of human actions is an important skill in our adaptation to the environment. We rely on our visual system to constantly interpret …
The goal of this thesis is to investigate the question of developmental continuity in language acquisition. In particular, it aims to address whether representations of …
Infants learn to segment words from fluent speech during the same period as they learn native language phonetic categories, yet accounts of phonetic category acquisition …
Declarative memory has long been known to depend on the medial temporal lobe memory system. Recently, there has been renewed focus on the relationship between …
On-line control and model-based control are two general approaches to visual control of human actions. When intercepting a moving target, humans appear to use the …
The local interactions between neighbors serve as the fundamental building blocks that give rise to human crowd behavior, but little is known about the actual …
This thesis introduces mechanism domains as a cognitive representation underlying causal reasoning. It has been observed that people believe they understand causal workings in more …
Real-world events produce both auditory and visual signals that, together, comprise our perceptual experience of that event. At issue is how the brain integrates information …
This dissertation presents a line of research that investigates the information people use to pursue and evade other pedestrians and to perceive whether other pedestrians …
Current models of cognitive control propose that the capacity to control one’s ongoing thoughts and actions is supported by a response threshold adjustment process involving …
To become productive language users, learners must assign words to grammatical categories such as noun, verb or adjective. This supports linguistic productivity as newly learned …
In the last couple of decades, categorization experiments using natural images have started to unravel the way our brain represents and categorizes visual information. Unfortunately, …