In The News

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,...

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...