Core Faculty of the Cognitive Psychology Program
All of our faculty are active researchers with a continuous record of grant funding from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, among other sources. The current program head is Jonathan Fugelsang, who may be contacted for further information about the graduate program in Cognitive Psychology.
Derek Besner, Professor
(BA, Loyola; MSC, Memorial; PhD, Reading)
My primary research interests involve basic processes in reading, acquired reading disorders, semantic processing, orthographies and phonologies, computational modeling, intention and control, mental set, and attention and automaticity.
Jonathan Fugelsang, Assistant Professor
B.A. (Lakehead), M.A., Ph.D. (Saskatchewan)
My research interests span several topics in cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience, though my primary focus is in higher level cognition. Recently, my work has predominantly focused on how we integrate multiple sources of information when making complex decisions. These decisions may involve analogical, causal, deductive, or inductive reasoning processes. To understand the mechanisms underlying these processes, I use both behavioural and functional brain imaging (e.g., ERP, fMRI) methodologies.
Derek Koehler, Professor
(BS, Wisconsin; PhD, Stanford)
My research investigates the intuitive assessment of uncertainty involved in everyday planning, prediction, and decision making. This research includes the study of how people evaluate evidence (or cues, e.g., a patient's symptoms) when estimating the probability of an uncertain event (or outcome, e.g., the patient's eventual diagnosis), how generating scenarios or explanations influences the perceived likelihood of future events, and how current intentions influence self-predictions of future behavior. In the course of this research, my collaborators and I have asked basketball fans to predict the outcomes of upcoming NBA games, physicians to judge the probability that a patient is suffering from a particular illness, homeowners to predict when they will complete a household project, and students to estimate the probability that they will donate blood at an upcoming donation clinic. Much of my recent research is located at the intersection of psychology and economics, in a field sometimes called behavioral economics.
Colin MacLeod, Professor
(BA, McGill; PhD, Washington)
Throughout my career, my research has emphasized the broad domain of human cognition, with particular focus on attention, learning, and memory. Initially, my work was in the area of verbal learning and memory, with emphasis on long-term memory structure and process, and especially in intentional forgetting, a topic which I have continued to study. Subsequently, I also became interested in individual differences in cognition, highlighting how people differ in their linguistic and spatial skills and strategies. Some of this work revolved around basic processes involved in reading. These domains then led me to a continuing interest in the area of attention. Primarily, this research has concerned the development of skill (automaticity) through learning/practice, particularly using the Stroop colour-word interference measure as a model task. In recent years, my memory research has focused on the role of consciousness in memory and on the distinction between indirect tests of memory (implicit measures that do not require conscious awareness) and direct tests of memory (explicit measures that do require conscious awareness). I am especially fascinated by the interaction between attention and memory, and with the role that learning plays in that interaction.
Jennifer Stolz, Professor
(BS, Union College; PhD, Albany)
My interests center on processes underlying attention and automaticity, and how skills (primarily reading-related) are acquired, maintained, and modified by context. Of particular interest to me is how attention interacts with, and is affected by, codes important for reading (e.g., semantics). For instance, is a word's meaning automatically retrieved each time we encounter the word, or is the retrieval of meaning context dependent?
I am also interested in exploring the interaction between attention and consciousness.
The Cognitive Neuroscience Program
The members of the department's Behavioural Neuroscience program have research interests in or very closely related to cognitive psychology, so collaboration here is anticipated. They are:
Britt Anderson, Assistant Professor
(BA, Arizona; MD, Southern California; PhD, Brown)
I am interested in developing mechanistically specific models of cognitive phenomena and submitting those models to experimental examination.
Currently, I am putting most of my energy on the topic of attention, broadly conceived. One interest is quasi-philosophical: what do we mean by the term ``attention'' and is our use consistent and cogent? In general, I feel attention is a "bad" word; attention is often reified. This reification leads to wasted experimental effort exploring nonsensical hypotheses and also obfuscates the presentation and interpretation of experimental data. What we need instead is an account of the experimental phenomena in terms of the experimental manipulations that lead to their being labeled as ``attentional.'' I think a good case can be made that attention is a Bayesian Decision Process (BDP).
A BDP has a few core components: a prior probability distribution, a likelihood, and a cost function. From these, and an assumption of what is the measure of ``optimal,'' one can calculate the ideal solution. I conjecture that we will find that all our so-called attentional results can be explained in terms of these three factors and that we can do quite well without the term attention, except perhaps as a verbal shorthand for these sorts of effects. Therefore, I spend a fair amount of time working to test this idea psychophysically. I have been testing participants in an experiment where the prior probability of where targets can appear in a simple visual discrimination task is modulated. We have found a potent effect of spatial prior probability. Other follow up studies are on-going.
A related notion of attention forks from the clinical syndrome of hemi-spatial neglect. This was an early research interest of mine during my years as an active practicing neurologist. From that experience, I came to appreciate that neglect is not homogeneous, strictly visual, nor simply spatial, and it certainly is not ``hemi;'' but still, in the colloquial sense, there does seem to be something common to many of these patients. My colleague, James Danckert, has been active in exploring the non-classical impairments of parietal lobe injury. Together, we are working on an account of parietal lobe injury that seeks to unify the mechanims under the concept of representational updating. Currently, we are working on a more theoretical paper that will make this notion of updating better defined and more concrete, at least from a functional standpoint. In addition, we are collaborating together and with our students on various psychophysical studies assessing how well participants with parietal lobe injury can learn to update an internal representation in response to environmental changes. One major research line has the participants playing Rock, Paper, Scissors. A second, looks at the ability to learn, covertly, a spatial probability distribution that influences target locations in a classification task.
I am also cross appointed to the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience (CTN) which brings together researchers from Biology, Mathematics, Philosophy and Psychology to develop biologically plausible computational models of neural systems. Students enrolled in a PhD in any of these departments can also take a Diploma in Theoretical Neuroscience through the CTN.
If you are interested in graduate studies on these topics, drop me a line and we can see if we have common interests. Unlike many faculty in the department, I am happy to consider applications from individuals with non-psychology degrees, especially if they have computational training.
James Danckert, Associate Professor
Chair of Cognitive Neuroscience
Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Cognitive Neuroscience
(BA, Melbourne University, Australia; MA, PhD, La Trobe University, Australia)
My research interests are primarily in human neuropsychology, and, more specifically, in the effects of right parietal brain lesions on behaviour. Right parietal lesions often lead to the disorder of neglect – the inability to attend or respond to stimuli in left visual space. Put simply, neglect patients behave as if one half of the world has simply ceased to exist. My research explores the nature of this fascinating disorder as well as examining the benefits and limitations of a recent rehabilitation technique which uses prismatic lenses. More recently, we have developed a model of neglect which suggests the disorder is best characterised as an inability to update internal representations of the external world and the patient's current or future goals for action. The methodologies we employ include behavioural studies (i.e., examining reaction times), kinematic measures (i.e., eye and hand movements) and functional MRI, which we conduct at Grand River Hospital. We recently established a database of neurological patients who are willing to participate in research which now has over 200 patients enrolled. In addition to the neglect research my lab is interested in how the brain perceives time and integrates temporal perception with spatial processes. We are also exploring the consequences of traumatic brain injury (usually from acceleration/deceleration injuries) on measures of sustained and transient attention and the more general experience of boredom. This work is also developing definitions of boredom and is exploring the physiological signature of the experience (i.e., using galvanic skin responses, heart rate and cortisol measures).
Funding sources: NSERC, CFI, HSF, ERA
Neurological Patient Database website http://npd.uwaterloo.ca/
Danckert Attention and Action Group: http://thedaag.uwaterloo.ca/Mike Dixon, Professor
(BSc, Trent; MA, PhD, Concordia)
My research entails two distinct research programs. The first concerns investigating people with synaesthesia – a condition where ordinary stimuli lead to extraordinary experiences. We have conducted research on numerous forms of synaesthesia including grapheme-colour synaesthesia where ordinary black digits or letters are experienced in colour, and time-space synaesthesia where time units, like months of the year, are associated with highly specific spatial locations (e.g., June is 30 degrees to the left of midline). A second research program involves investigating gambling behaviour. Specifically we have looked at some of the features of slot machines that make them so alluring, and for a small set of the population, so addictive.
Funding sources: Ontario Problem Gambling Research Centre; NSERC; Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada
Problem gambling web page: http://problemgambling.uwaterloo.ca/
Synaesthesia Research Centre web page: http://watarts.uwaterloo.ca/~src/home.htm
Colin Ellard, Associate Professor
(BSc, Toronto; PhD, U. Western Ontario)
I am interested in how the organization and appearance of natural and built spaces affects movement, wayfinding, emotion and physiology. My approach to these questions is strongly multidisciplinary and is informed by collaborations with architects, artists, planners, and health professionals. Current studies include investigations of the psychology of residential design, wayfinding at the urban scale, restorative effects of exposure to natural settings, and comparative studies of defensive responses. My research methods include both field investigations and studies of human behaviour in immersive virtual environments.
Funding sources: NSERC
Research Laboratory for Immersive Virtual Environments web page: http://virtualpsych.uwaterloo.ca/mainpage2.htm
Myra Fernandes, Associate Professor
(BSc, Waterloo; MA, PhD, Toronto)
My research program involves developing an understanding of the cognitive processes, and brain regions, involved in memory and language. I am interested in knowing how we encode new information, how it is organized and represented in the brain, and how we reactivate the information during retrieval. I am particularly interested in how these change as people age. I evaluate the ability of young adults and seniors to carry out a memory task under conditions in which there is another on-going task competing for their attention. The amount and type of interference observed allows one to infer the cognitive resources and components required for the two tasks, and can provide insight into human memory processing. I also use neuroimaging (fMRI) to identify the brain regions and networks (using PLS) mediating memory processing; these are used to determine how the strategy and brain regions contributing to memory change as we age. A related research interest lies in understanding how different types of information (words, numbers, symbols, spatial layouts) are represented and organized in the brain, through the use of behavioural paradigms, fMRI, and neural network models. My other line of research examines the relationship between neuropsychological and neuroimaging methods of evaluation of language localization.
Funded by NSERC, CIHR, and Ontario Ministry of Research & Innovation.Click here to go to the Lab web site: http://fernandeslab.uwaterloo.ca/
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Daniel Smilek, Associate Professor
(BSc, McMaster; MA, PhD, Waterloo)
My research focuses on understanding how attention and perception operate in everyday situation. I address this general issue using two distinct and complementary approaches. The first approach involves using standard laboratory tasks to uncover the cognitive and neural mechanisms that underlie attention and perception. The second approach involves observing and describing how attention and perception operate as individuals engage in purposeful activities in their natural environments.
My research not only considers the usual experiences that are associated with attention and perception but also various unusual experiences, such as those that accompany a fascinating condition known as synaesthesia. I use a broad range of methods including behavioural testing, neuro-imaging, naturalistic observation, and analysis of subjective reports. Often projects also involve the development of new measures and analysis techniques.
Funding Sources: NSERC
Synaesthesia Research Group web page: http://www.synaesthesia.uwaterloo.ca/
Additional Faculty with Interests in Cognitive Psychology
There are also colleagues with related research interests in other research groups in the department (e.g., Michael Ross in Social, Jonathan Oakman in Clinical, Daniela O'Neill in Developmental). As well, there are colleagues with cognitive research interests in other departments of the university (e.g., Paul Thagard in Philosophy, Eric Roy in Kinesiology, and William Cowan in Computer Science), and also at nearby Wilfrid Laurier University.
