In The News

Four undergraduate students from Prof. Karin Stromswold’s Language Acquisition and Processing lab recently traveled to Boston Massachusetts to present their research at the Eastern Psychological Association conference.  These young scholars have been conducting research which shows that very early language exposure subtly influences the way adults say and understand different aspects of English including pronouns (Serena Cheenath), wh-questions (Camila Daboin), phrase boundary prosody (Olivia...

Prof. Jenny Wang at Rutgers’ Cognition and Learning Center leads study uncovering how gender bias influences math education with her students Kathleen Cracknell (Doctoral student) and Julia Hauss (Graduate student). Young children are more inclined to believe incorrect math information from men than accurate information from women, according to a Rutgers University–New Brunswick study published in the journal Developmental Science. Read the full...

The Cognitive Science Society has announced the winners of the 2025 Mind Challenge, and we are proud to share that Dr. Ryan Rhodes, Dr. Shannon Bryant, and Dr. Sten Knutsen from the Center for Cognitive Science earned first place in this prestigious competition. Dr. Rhodes is an Assistant Teaching Professor, Dr. Bryant is a Lecturer, and Dr. Knutsen is a Postdoctoral Associate at RuCCS. Each year, the Mind Challenge invites cognitive scientists to create a five-minute video addressing a key question...

Rutgers Symposium on Learning IV On Sunday, November 9th, We celebrated the influential career of Dr. Alan Leslie with a star studded lineup of invited speakers across disciplines.  Click here for more details: Rutgers Symposium on Learning IV

Dr. Ryan Rhodes is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He won 1st place 🥇 in the 2024 CogSci Mind Challenge hosted at the Cognitive Science Society: https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/cogsci-mind-challenge/. In this video, Dr. Ryan Rhodes narrates several processes related to memory in an entertaining and informative way. He leverages exciting audiovisuals to underscore his approachable teaching style and make his video, well, memorable!  Each year, the...

 Congratulations to James Preston Lennon, a RuCCS Post Doctoral Associate whose research paper, “Are Phenomenal Theories of Thought Chauvinistic? “ was published in a July 2024 issue of the American Philosophical Quarterly! Read the paper here https://scholarlypublishingcollective.org/uip/apq/issue/61/3

The Board of Governors appointed SAS professor Dimitri Metaxas as Board of Governors Professors, a designation that celebrates the most decorated academic scholars at the university.  Metaxas, of the Department of Computer Science, has received numerous awards for his research and mentored many postdoctoral researchers, including over 67 Ph.D. students.

Even before taking her first class at Rutgers, Julia Rhodes had a paper published in a national scientific journal and worked on research at the Rutgers Brain Health Institute. The first year student plans to major in cognitive science in SAS and continue conducting research on the brain. "I want to join a lab and keep pursuing that kind of work," she told Rutgers Today. "It's really exciting that I got to start before going to college."

https://www.rutgers.edu/news/rutgers-researchers-develop-reminder-system-enhance-memory-recall# External reminders are crucial for memory support because they can unlock information that was previously hard to access. Professor Qiong Zhang and graduate student Charlotte Cornell sought to develop an automated way of selecting helpful reminders when memory recall becomes challenging. This work is supported by National Science Foundation and recently published in the journal Psychological Science.

This year, the Honors College welcomes four new Faculty Fellows to join Dean Bowers, including two Residential Fellows who live in the Honors College and two Affiliate Fellows who are present at regular times throughout the week. All are here to offer their time and ear for mentorship and conversation about anything on students' minds. One of which is our own, Kristen Syrett, HC Affiliated Faculty Fellow—a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science and an advocate for gender equity and...

In a study published in Psychological Review, Drs. Sommer, Hemmer, and Musolino analyzed previous studies and have developed a new scientific theory they say is behind the psychology of belief. To learn more, please see this link. 

The Rutgers University Board of Governors has named Alan M. Leslie as Board of Governors Professor of Psychology effective July 1. Leslie, a Distinguished Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science in the School of Arts and Sciences, is renowned forhis research into the mechanisms of the mind that give rise to thought and knowledge. For more information please see this link.

Professor Torres, Director of the Sensory Motor Integration Laboratory, receives Career Development Award from the Nancy Lurie Marks Family Foundation. The award, a second in her tenure at Rutgers University, is to lend continuity to her research program in autism and embodied cognition. This brings the generous contributions of the Foundation to over 1.3 million dollars to the Torres lab, for research in autism. 

Professor Torres’ Sensory Motor Integration Lab has received the Community Partner Award from the International Association for Spelling as Communication. This award is for developing accionable science that helps autistic non-speakers understand their sensory motor differences and educates society to support them and help improve communication. The SMIL students and postdocs hosted Autistic Non-Speakers and their families at their April 2023 NJACE Global conference. For more Information,...

The Rutgers of Innovation Ventures celebrated the Research Inventors on May 22, 2023 and Prof. Torres received an award for her US patents. They will accelerate the translation of the Sensory Motor Integration Lab discoveries to real-world applications and will bring revenue to the SAS unit, the Psychology Dept. and the Torres SMIL.

Elizabeth Torres is a Rutgers' Professor of Psychology as well as part of Rutgers Center of Cognitive Sciences. Her area of focus is Cognitive Psychology. Her lab studies how people move in connection to how they think.They use the signals from the Peripheral Nervous Systems to Understand the Central Nervous System. All motions, intended, spontaneous, automatic and autonomic, are inherently variable. They study the signatures of such variability, as they provide a proxy of our mental spaces,...