In The News

Congratulations to Dr. Karin Stromswold, RuCCS Executive Council Member and Professor of Psychology, has been selected as a recipient of the 2022-23 Chancellor-Provost Awards for Faculty Excellence! The awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education are given annually to professors and teaching assistants in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) to "recognize their outstanding achievements in and beyond the classroom, their engagement with their students and pedagogic...

Nightline seeks out the expertise of Dimitris Metaxas, professor of computer science and affiliate member of Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, for its investigative report on Madison Square Garden's use of facial recognition technology to ban attendees from events. Metaxas explains to Nightline reporters how the technology works, and then says that given the advances to cameras and computers, it's likely that facial recognition capabilities "will become cheaper and usable by anybody." For...

Dr. Ryan Rhodes is an Assistant Teaching Professor of Center for Cognitive Science at Rutgers University. He won 2nd place in the Cognitive Science Society's CogSci Mind Challenge winning a sum of $500, in which he had to create a five-minute video addressing a key question within Cognitive Science but for an audience of non-experts, particularly high school and early college students. The question for this competition was, “Can Machines Think?” He would also like to thank his brother Alex...

Jinjing Jenny Wang, is a assistant professor of cognitive psychology in the School of Arts and Sciences at Rutgers University. When Jinjing Jenny Wang embarked on a two-year study to determine whether infants experience any cognitive benefits from watching someone count out loud on screen instead of in person, she had already seen what affect such a video had on her own daughter at 10 months old. In addition, a recent study by Wang of 81 babies between 14 and 19 months old published in...

Kristen joined Rutgers in 2011, as a professor in the Department of Linguistics and the Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science. An expert in the areas of language acquisition and psycholinguistics, Kristen is the director of the Rutgers Laboratory for Developmental Language Studies, where she and her students' study how humans acquire the meaning of words. She is a strong supporter of undergraduate research and a devoted mentor to her students. Kristen received her Ph.D. from Northwestern...

Elizabeth Torres is a Rutgers' Professor and as well as part of Rutgers Center of Cognitive Sciences and Department of Psychology. Her area of focus is Cognitive Psychology. She received her PhD in Cognitive Science in 2001 from the University of California, San Diego and did her Post-Doctoral training in electrophysiology at CALTECH. She has been on the faculty at Rutgers since 2008. Her research combines theory and experiments to study how primates plan, execute, learn and adapt to natural...

Congratulations to Gwendolyn L. Rehrig, Michelle Cheng, Brian C. McMahan and Rahul Shome (two in Psychology; two in Computer Science) who, with funding from the Perceptual Science IGERT (NSF), worked as a team on a project as part of the IGERT-created Interdisciplinary Methods in Perceptual Science course. Their project, published recently in the journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, used an innovative active visual search task combined with Bayesian ideal observer modeling...

Konstantinos Michmizos, RuCCS EC Member, will be giving the keynote speech on Neuromorphic Computing and Neuro-Robotics at the 2021 IEEE International Conference on Imaging Systems and Techniques (IST). The conference is to be held on August 24th-26th of this year in New York. The IEEE IST is the premier conference demonstrating frontier research results in imaging technologies, systems, and techniques. For more information on the conference, visit here.

Congratulations to Dr. Karin Stromswold, RuCCS Executive Council Member and Professor of Psychology, has been selected as a recipient of the 2019-2020 Rutgers School of Arts and Science Award for Distinguished Contributions to  Undergraduate Education at the Professor rank! The awards for Distinguished Contributions to Undergraduate Education are given annually to professors and teaching assistants in the School of Arts and Sciences (SAS) to "recognize their outstanding achievements in and...

Mariapaola D'Imperio, RuCCS Affiliate and Distinguished Professor, has been elected to the International Speech Communication Association (ISCA) Board for 2021-2025. She is elected to the board alongside 7 other international members from the US, the UK, Singapore, Sweden, Japan, India, and the Netherlands. For more on ISCA, visit the website here.

Austin A. Baker, RuCCS Post Doctoral Associate, was interviewed on the Ipse Dixit podcast, a podcast on legal scholarship, alongside their collaborator J. Remy Green to discuss their article "There is No Such Thing as a Legal Name: A Strange, Shared Delusion." In the interview, Baker discusses how there is no universal definition of a "legal name" contrary what most people believe. Furthermore, Baker argues in the interview that the law can and does allow people to use the names they want...

Congratulations to graduate student Carolina Flores who won the Society for Women in Philosophy - New York City (SWIP-NYC) essay prize for her submission! The SWIP-NYC essay prize competition takes place annually and is open to graduate students in all areas of philosophy who are women or who have ever been identified as women. Winners of the competition are invited to present their papers in New York City in the second half of the spring semester. Flores is the 2021 competition's co-winner...

In the paper titled "Is This Going to Be on The Test? Test Expectancy Moderates the Disfluency Effect with Sans Forgetica," Dr. Jason Geller and colleague Dr. Daniel Peterson of Skidmore College examine whether the popular eccentric typeface called "Sans Forgetica" can truly enhance memory. In recent years Sans Forgetica was largely believed by the media to help you remember more information—with little to no scientific backing. As a scientist, Geller decided to conduct the studies needed to...

Rutgers' Associate Professor and RuCCS Executive Councilmember Dr. Julien Musolino is one of the invited speakers for the Fifth International Vatican Conference taking place from May 6  to May 8, 2021. The discussion of this year's conference is "Exploring the Mind, Body & Soul Unite to Prevent & Unite to Cure". Along with Dr. Musolino, Dr. Anthony Fauci, Deepak Chopra, Chelsea Clinton, Ray Dalio, and lots of other professionals are also invited speakers at the conference. For further...

The Sixth Julesz Lecture is taking place on Tuesday, April 13, 2021. It is being hosted by Dr. Brian Rogers and will be taking place via Zoom. In order to get access to the lecture, please pre-register with the link provided below. For previous years' Julesz Lectures on Brain Research, check here.      "Perception, Art, and Illusion" by Brian Rogers Tuesday, April 13, 2021 at 1:00 pm USA-ET / 10:00 am USA-PT / 6:00 pm GMT Zoom link:  Pre-Register                                                                                                                                                                          After registering, you will receive a confirmation...

Dr. Elizabeth Torres, RuCCS Affiliate and Associate Professor of Psychology, made the cover of the Journal of Personalized Medicine (shown right) for her paper "Digitized ADOS: Social Interactions beyond the Limits of the Naked Eye" owing to high public interest and spike in downloads. The paper discusses artificial intelligence and machine learning related work and wearables that when combined with clinical criteria offer much more to families than current and traditional autism diagnoses alone...

Dr. Jason Geller started as the new Research Programmer at RuCCS last July. Geller came to RuCCS with a lot of experience and skills including a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Iowa State University. He spent the last three years in two postdoc positions—one at the University of Alabama-Birmingham working with Dan Mirman and one at the University of Iowa working with Inyong Choi and Bob McMurray.  Geller's main research interests are in psycholinguistics (visual and spoken word recognition),...

RuCCS Affiliate and Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Dr. Mark Baker was inducted as a Fellow in the Linguistics Society of America (LSA). Baker is one of nine linguists selected for the 2021 Class of Fellows by the LSA. Members of the Society who have made distinguished contributions to the discipline may be recognized and inducted as Fellows, including scholarly excellence, service to speech communities, teaching and mentoring excellence, and more. See Baker alongside the eight other...

RuCCS Affiliate and Assistant Professor of Psychology Kasia Bieszczad was awarded a $1.7M grant through the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) for her project, "Molecular Epigenetic Mechanisms that Transform the Auditory System for Learning and Memory." The project aims to investigate epigenetic neural mechanisms that can ensure meaningful sounds are faithfully and adaptively represented in the adult auditory brain. The NIDCD scored Bieszczad's proposal in...

RuCCS Affiliate and Associate Professor of Linguistics Kristen Syrett was awarded a $267K grant through the National Science Foundation (NSF) Linguistics Program in the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences. The grant goes towards funding Syrett's project entitled "Cross-categorical context dependence: Bridging developmental, experimental, and theoretical perspectives" starting January 2021 for three years.