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Published: 20 January 2026

 

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 article:
https://www.rutgers.edu/news/how-gender-bias-influences-math-education

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Published: 05 January 2026

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 for a non-expert audience, particularly high school and early college students.

The 2025 question was: “How do different minds (i.e., different groups of humans, animals, artificial systems) learn language, if at all?”

Explore all winning projects on the official website and watch the RuCCS team’s winning entry here.

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Published: 07 November 2025

Rutgers Symposium on Learning IV

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Published: 15 April 2025

A Rutgers-led study examines how detecting microscopic facial movements, previously overlooked, are key to enhancing emotional recognition in autistic individuals. A study led by Rutgers University–New Brunswick researchers suggests that tiny facial movements too slight for the human eye to notice – could help scientists better understand social communication in people with autism. Published in Frontiers in Psychiatry, the study found that while individuals with autism express emotions like everyone else, their facial expressions may be too subtle for the human eye to detect. “Autistic individuals use the same basic facial movements to express emotions, but their intensity often falls outside the culturally familiar range that most people recognize,” said Elizabeth Torres, a psychology professor at the Rutgers–New Brunswick School of Arts and Sciences. “This disconnect can lead to missed social cues, causing others to overlook or misinterpret their emotions.” 

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Published: 10 December 2024

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 CogSci Mind Challenge invites Cognitive Scientists to create a five-minute video addressing a key question within Cognitive Science for an audience of non-experts, particularly high school and early college students.  The question for this competition was, “Why do our memories sometimes fade or fail?”  
A special thanks to Prof. Shannon Bryant for agreeing to be the opening act for the presentation~!

Click here to learn more about his submission.