Cognitive Division
Program Description
Members of the Cognitive Division have research programs focused on human memory, language processing, categorization, reasoning, computational modeling, and cognitive aging. The emphasis in the Division is focused on acquiring exceptionally strong research skills in a domain chosen by the student, working closely with individual faculty members and using multiple dependent measures to study a given area. Faculty members and students in the Cognitive Division have research interests and collaborations that overlap with those in every other Division in the Department. In addition to strong intersections with the Visual Cognition and Human Performance and Brain & Cognition divisions, there are also collaborations with social, developmental, and quantitative psychologists.
Curriculum
The Division has a large array of graduate courses that cover the field of cognitive psychology in an exceptionally comprehensive manner. Students develop a specialized course of study designed to provide expertise in their particular areas of interest, but also acquire breadth in the field through coursework outside the Division and well as through interdisciplinary collaborations. All students complete a first year project that is presented to the faculty at a weekly research seminar attended by all students and faculty in the Division. By the end of the third year, students will have completed the Comprehensive Examination as well as the majority of their course work. The material to be covered on the Comprehensive Examination is jointly decided by the student and his or her faculty advisor. The remaining years in the program are devoted to completing a dissertation, publishing data collected earlier, as well as developing depth and breadth in preparation for a career in academia, industry, or government service, with the majority of students entering academia.
Facilities and Resources
The facilities associated with the Division are superlative. Every faculty member has substantial laboratory space in either the Psychology Department or Beckman Institute dedicated to his or her research program. All students have access to a vast array of state of the art technologies and methodologies as well as a high end computing environment. Tools available to study cognition, in addition to traditional behavioral methods, include a research-dedicated head only 3 Tesla scanner for functional neuroimaging, as well as optical imaging, EEG/ERP, and eye-tracking. Students have access to many different subject populations, including older adults, children, and clinic populations. The technical resources available to students in the Cognitive Division are among the most comprehensive and best in the world for the study of human cognition.
Affiliated Departments, Programs and Institutes
All members of the Cognitive Division have appointments in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In addition, faculty members collaborate with faculty members in other Departments at UIUC, including Linguistics, Engineering, Educational Psychology, Kinesiology, the Genomics Institute, and the Institute of Aviation. Cross-cultural research opportunities for the study of cognition are also available in China and Singapore.
Cognitive Division Faculty
Aaron S. Benjamin, Associate Professor
Human learning, memory, and decision-making.
Office: Room 827 | (217) 333-6822 | asbenjam@illinois.edu
J. Kathryn Bock, Professor
How people turn thoughts into speech, including: how the features of ideas affect language forms; what goes wrong when speakers make errors in selecting or arranging words; and the cognitive processes that control how words are arranged.
Office: Room 811 | (217) 244-1121 | jkbock@illinois.edu
Sarah Brown-Schmidt, Assistant Professor
Primary research area: Language processing in Conversation.
Office: Room 2047 Beckman Institute | (217) 244-4787 | brownsch@illinois.edu
Gary S. Dell, Professor
Language production and comprehension; connectionist models of psycholinguistic phenomena.
Office: Room 833 | (217) 244-1294 | gdell@cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu
Kara D. Federmeier, Associate Professor
Neurobiological basis of meaning, including how world knowledge derived from multiple modalities is organized in the brain, how it is used during language comprehension, and how it is accessed and used by the two cerebral hemispheres.
Office: Room 831 | (217) 333-8303 | kfederme@illinois.edu
Susan M. Garnsey, Associate Professor & Associate Head for Graduate Affairs
Language processing; resolution of syntactic and lexical ambiguity and context effects on that resolution; the effect of prosody on disambiguation; on-line techniques for measuring language comprehension; word recognition; and language/brain relationships.
Office: Room 810 | (217) 244-1120 | sgarnsey@psych.illinois.edu
John E. Hummel, Professor
Relational processing in perception and cognition. Neurocomputational origins of relational (i.e., symbolic) thought.
Office: Room 825 | (217) 265-6090 | jehummel@illinois.edu
Brian H. Ross, Professor and interim Department Head
Cognitive psychology issues in learning, memory, problem solving and categorization. In particular: problem-solving and learning in complex domains, categorization, learning, and use of concepts. Remindings and the use of memory.
Office: Room 835 | (217) 333-8745 | bhross@illinois.edu
Duane Watson, Associate Professor
Language production, comprehension, prosody and disfluencies
Office: Room 829 | (217) 333-0280 | dgwatson@illinois.edu
Associated Faculty
William F. Brewer, Professor Emeritus
Cognitive psychology; cognitive science; knowledge representation; acquisition of knowledge; discourse; reading comprehension; psychology of science; and history of psychology.
Office: Room 629 | (217) 333-1548 | wbrewer@illinois.edu
Donelson E. Dulany, Professor Emeritus
Experimental analysis and theory of intentional action, causal reasoning, and implicit learning; mentalistic metatheory.
Office: Room 421 | (217) 333-2971 | ddulany@illinois.edu
Edward J. Shoben, Professor Emeritus
Office: Room 512 CBC, UNLV | (702) 895-0193 | eshoben@cyrus.uiuc.edu