In The News

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.

Within the span of one week, RuCCS Director John McGann was mentioned and cited in two New York Times and New Yorker articles on the topic of sense of smell! One feature article in the NYT, "What Can Covid-19 Teach Us About the Mysteries of Smell?" quotes McGann's research on the myth of poor sense of smell in humans via his 2017 paper, "Poor human olfaction is a 19th-century myth." The other New Yorker article, "How to Make Sense of Scents," refers to this same paper and even dubs it a...

Congratulations to RuCCS alumna Malihe Alikhani on receiving a Google exploreCSR Grant! The grant will be used to encourage computing research among underrepresented groups. Alikhani is is now an Assistant Professor at the School of Computing and Information at the University of Pittsburgh. She states, "We will hold workshops and mentoring sessions to empower students to create technologies that best serve their communities and help them succeed in research and graduate studies by fostering an...

Graduate Certificate Student Carolina Flores' paper "Delusional Evidence-Responsiveness" is forthcoming in an edition of the scholarly paper Synthese. In the paper, Flores argues that delusions are evidence-responsive and looks at consequences for long-standing debates on the nature of delusions and at ethical and treatment implications. Flores notes, "Though delusions may seem like a niche topic, I hope that some of what I say here is helpful for thinking about conspiracy theories,...

Cognitive Science graduate student Keith Perkins was selected for the prestigious Neuroscience Scholars Program (NSP) ran by the Society for Neuroscience. Perkins was selected as one of 18 total Fellows nationwide. The NSP is a fellowship for underrepresented and diverse graduate students and postdoctoral fellows in neuroscience which provides resources focused on "career advancement issues, the research process, and cutting-edge scientific content." For more on the program visit the site here.

Dr. Elizabeth Torres, Professor in the Psychology Department and RuCCS, has been personally honored by a Joint Resolution of the New Jersey Senate and General Assembly saluting the excellence of her "groundbreaking research" at Rutgers that has been "essential in shaping initiatives that transform autism medical research and treatments throughout our State." The language of the resolution is remarkable, not only praising Torres' scientific contributions and service as the Director of the New...