Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science
Dr. Williams is a Distinguished Professor and the Prudential Chair in Business (Marketing Depart) in the Rutgers Business School. He formerly served as Provost and Executive Vice Chancellor of Rutgers University-Newark. His research is in the areas of multicultural marketing, Internet privacy, public health communication, and algorithmic justice.
Psycholinguistics: morphological and syntactic structure. Language acquisition: representation of the soundwave; syntax; construction of the lexicon.
Before moving to Rutgers I was at the University of Western Ontario in London, Canada, where I was professor in the departments of Psychology, Computer Science, Philosophy and Electrical Engineering and supervised graduate students in all these departments. I joined the Rutgers Psychology Department in 1991 and, at the request of the provost and the dean of the faculty of Arts and Science, established the Center for Cognitive Science (known as RuCCS, and pronounced /ruckus/) which I directed until 1997 before returning to full-time research. I have done research on, and have written about mental imagery, visual attention and cognitive architecture. Some of this work is thought to be of interest to philosophy as well as psychology. Some of my studies are visual attention and pre-attentive location indexing with application to visual tracking, perceptual- motor coordination, and teleoperation; empirical constraints on cognitive architecture, especially for imagery.
Improved software development techniques, in areas involving databases or requirements engineering. Since such systems maintain models of some (users' beliefs about) reality, my approach is usually based on the use of knowledge representation and reasoning techniques/logics. As a result, I sometime contribute to KR&R research to achieve my goals.
Department of Computer Science.
Representation and acquisition of lexical information; development of minimalist and optimality-based theories of phrase structure and functional projections.
Phonological theory and the cognitive science of language; interaction of universal constraints on representational well-formedness to define grammatical systems.
Syntactic theory; explanation of anaphora crosslinguistically and across the boundaries of syntax, semantics, pragmatics and language acquisition; formal learnability theory as applied to language acquisition.
Philosophy of mind and psychology, the epistemology of science and the explanatory role of representational content in computational psychology.
Philosophical problems about psychology, including theoretical and experimental investigations of cognitive architecture, psycholinguistics and cognitive development.
Simulationist versus theory-theory approaches to mindreading, including reading emotion in faces; self-knowledge, self-report, and consciousness; descriptive and normative issues in reasoning; folk ontology.
Nature and viability of commonsense (or "folk") psychology, moral cognition & moral reasoning and rationality.
His research interests are in human and machine vision, neural mechanisms in vision, image processing, imaging systems, and scientific visualization techniques. He is investigating the mechanisms that underlie the perception of visual motion, stereopsis, texture, and the deployment of attention in vision.
Fully automated, highly diagnostic behavioral screens for abilities in learning and memory in the mouse and zebra fish. Also, animal cognition: spatial, temporal, and numerical learning and reasoning in animals.
Causal and quantitative reasoning, constraints on concept acquisition, and the role of informal environments (e.g., in cognitive development).
Study of the sensory cues, spatial representations and cognitive factors that guide patterns of smooth and saccadic eye.
Perceptual Science Website
Professor of Psychology and Computer Science, FAS-NB; Ph.D., Iowa
Human and machine planning and plan recognition; human and machine problem solving and learning; human-computer interaction; discourse. Problem reformulation and reduction, planning, plan recognition, learning, and person-machine interaction.
This laboratory studies the activity of neurons that receive dopaminergic synaptic input during behaviors correlated with dopamine transmission. Our long range goal is to better understand the activity of dopamine's target neurons with respect to reward learning and drug abuse.
Behavior therapy; social learning theory; treatment of eating disorders.
