How the mind searches for words and concepts in memory may have its origins in age-old patterns by which human and nonhuman animals search for food and other resources in their physical environment. That is the theory which received fresh support from a neuroimaging study which examined the brain activity of study participants as they searched their long-term memories for words related to various concepts. In addition to teaching us about the basic strategies that people use to find relevant information, this work may also inspire a novel approach to understanding schizophrenia and other forms of psychosis, in which disorganization of speech and thought is a fundamental symptom.


The study was published on October 12, 2023 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences by researchers in the IU Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences and their collaborators. Its findings provide neural evidence of a continuity between foraging in space and mind.

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Huge congrats to lab alumnus Dr. Brendan Johns who was recently selected as the 2022 winner of the prestigious Vincent Di Lollo Early Career Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior, and Cognitive Science. Brendan adds this to his recent Early Career Award from the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 

PRESS RELEASE

Northwestern University (Jan 21): The stability-plasticity dilemma in predictive neural network models of semantic memory

​Mike Jones and Steve Lewandowsky were honored for their service to the Psychonomic Society at the recent Annual Conference. 

Mike steps down December 31 after six years as Editor-in-Chief of Behavior Research Methods (BRM), the world's top methodology journal. Mike and his team have built BRM into the highest impact journal in the 60-year history of the Psychonomic Society, and BRM now has a higher impact factor than all major competitors. 

Mike: Your watch has ended!

This year's Presidential Symposium at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Computation in Psychology (SCiP) featured the winners of the Early Career Award from the Federation of Associations of Behavioral and Brain Sciences (FABBS): Laura Allen (2019 winner), Rick Dale (2016 winner), and Mike Jones (2012 winner). 

Mike's talk was titled Limits of Deep Learning: Modeling Human Learning to Inform Machine Learning 

 Congrats to Jessica Montag on winning her first NSF grant as PI to study early word learning environments and the effects of early picture book reading. Jessica also won a prestigious J. S. McDonnell Foundation Award to develop new simulation methods to understand optimal early word learning environments, expanding on our recent paper in Cognitive Science. Jon and Jessica recently moved to University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where they are setting up their new labs. 

Mike will give one of the invited State-of-the-Art lectures at this year's International Congress of Applied Psychology in Montreal. Every four years, the IAAP organizes a world congress of applied psychology which serves as a review of advances in applied psychology and unites several thousand psychologists from all over the world. 

Mike's lecture is titled Advancing Psychological Theory by Mining Big Data and is intended to be a broad survey and taxonomy of current cutting edge work being conducted to use big and naturalistic data sources and sensors to reverse engineer the psychological mechanisms that generated the behavioral traces. 

Massive congratulations to Dr. Melody Dye, who is the recipient of this year's Glushko Dissertation Award from the Cognitive Science Society. This very competitive award is highest honor in our field for a graduate student, won for Melody's doctoral dissertation "Bridging Levels of Analysis: Learning, Information Theory, and the Lexicon."   It also comes with $10k, so that isn't bad either. 

Melody will receive the award and give a talk on her dissertation work at this year's Cognitive Science Society Conference in Madison. 

Congrats to lab alumna Melody Dye, who was presented with the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the IU Cognitive Science Program for her work adapting information theory to study optimal language and nominal systems design. 

Melody is currently a Sloan/Moore Data Science Postdoctoral Fellow at the School of Information, UC Berkeley. 

The lab's IES funded project with the Karpicke lab at Purdue was briefly covered in the recent issue of Science. The special piece was  spotlighting recent projects funded by IES to translate science of learning findings from the lab into practice in the classroom to boost learning and retention. 

READ FULL ARTICLE HERE. 

Farewell to Dr. Fatemeh Torabi Asr! 

Fatemeh has been the leader of the IU end of our IES project on automated learning technologies with the Karpicke Lab at Purdue Unviersity. Fatemeh leaves us to take a position at Simon Fraser University in Canada. 

Best of luck, and you will be greatly missed!

Huge congratulations to Dr. Melody Dye on successfully defending her PhD dissertation!

Melody has taken a position as a prestigious Berkeley Data Science Fellow, working with Marti Hearst at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science.

Farewell Mel, and good luck from us all!

Huge congratulations to Melody Dye for winning this year's David Marr Award from the Cognitive Science Society! The Marr Award is widely considered the most prestigious CogSci student award in the world...only one is given out each year for the best student paper. The award will be presented to Melody at the 2017 CogSci conference in London, UK. 

Melody won a very competitive position as a Berkeley Data Science Fellow, and will begin working with Marti Hearst at the UC Berkeley Institute for Data Science as soon as she defends her PhD next month! 

Congrats Mel!

Yogi's Bar and Grill has been the standard Friday afternoon watering hole for the cognitive science labs for well over a decade now. Sadly, it abuptly closed down, and we have no good home for after lab meetings. 

Many great ideas came from meetings in the area pictured to the left. Here is the final ever picture of the group brainstorming at Yogi's. 

Congrats to Dr. Janelle Szary, who leaves the lab next month to take up a prestigious Insight Data Science Fellowship in New York. Janelle will be working with the best in the world to bridge her computational skills from academia into industry to solve real problems! 

Best of luck from us all Janelle! 

Mike will present Modeling Human Learning to Inform Machine Learning as one of the invited plenary speakers at this year's High Performance Computing Symposium, Canada’s premiere Advanced Research Computing (ARC) conference, bringing together top researchers from across Canada and around the world, as well as major industry partners.

IU Bloomington Emerging Areas of Research program makes inaugural grant


FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
BLOOMINGTON, Ind. -- Can machines learn to think like children? An interdisciplinary team of cognitive scientists, neuroscientists and computer scientists at Indiana University Bloomington has received the campus’s inaugural Emerging Areas of Research funding award to explore that question.
Called “Learning: Brains, Machines and Children,” the first Emerging Areas of Research initiative is led by Linda Smith, Distinguished Professor and Chancellor’s Professor of psychological and brain sciences in the IU Bloomington College of Arts and Sciences. The research team will receive up to $3 million for the four-year project.  

[News Release]   [Project Description]

Lab Alumus Dr. Brendan Johns, now Assistant Professor at University at Buffalo presented a keynote talk at this year's Society for Computers in Psychology, in Boston. Brendan was invited as part of this year's focus topic on Cognitive Technologies. 

The title of Brendan's address was ​Content-Driven Machine Learning: Using Lexical Variability to Optimize Models of Natural Language, and this was the first introduction to the field of our new methodology for Experiential Optimization. 

We have released a github page containing a python implementation of gc-lda for identifying functional regions in the brain:

https://github.com/timothyrubin/python_gclda

Paper,    Supplemental materials,   ​Poster

Congrats to Dr. Tim Rubin, who is leaving his position in the lab to join the NLP Data Science Team at SurveyMonkey in Palo Alto. 

Tim ran our lab's arm of the multisite NeuroSynth project for 4 years, and created the NeuroTopics approach to co-discovery of functional-anatomical brain regions and cognitive processes from the neuroimaging literature. 

http://www.theonion.com/article/study-us-wastes-2-million-hours-annually-figuring--50764

But think of the massive impact on the economy if we could find an optimum solution strategy!