People
Robert A. Jacobs
PhD,
University of Massachusetts, 1990
Professor, Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Computer Science, & the Center for Visual Science
Curriculum
Vitae
- Meliora 416
- Brain & Cognitive Sciences
- University of Rochester
- Rochester, NY 14627-0268
- (585) 275-0753 (office)
- (585) 442-9216 (fax)
- Office Hours: By appointment
Short Bio: For my undergraduate studies, I attended the University of Pennsylvania where I majored in Psychology. I spent the next two years working as a Research Assistant in a biomedical research laboratory at Rockefeller University. For graduate school, I attended the University of Massachusetts at Amherst where I earned a Ph.D. degree in Computer and Information Science (graduate advisor: Andrew Barto). I then served in two postdoc positions, one in the Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (postdoc advisor: Michael Jordan), and the other in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University (postdoc advisor: Stephen Kosslyn). I'm currently a faculty member at the University of Rochester where my title is Professor of Brain & Cognitive Sciences, of Computer Science, and of the Center for Visual Science. I am also a member of the Center for Computation and the Brain.
The Computational Cognition and Perception Lab uses experimental and computational methodologies to study human learning and decision making in cognitive, perceptual, and motor domains. How is new information—whether its a friend's new phone number or a newly recognized visual feature that distinguishes the appearances of identical twins—acquired and how does it become established in memory? How is perceptual learning similar or different from cognitive learning and motor learning? How do people reason about environments with complex temporal dynamics? How do they choose actions in these environments so as to achieve a goal? To what extent are people's behaviors consistent with the optimal behaviors of computational models based on Bayesian statistics? Our research lab addresses these and other questions.
Current Postdoctoral Fellows & Graduate Students
We are currently seeking new graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to join our lab. If you're interested, please contact .
Chris Sims
Chris received his Ph.D. in cognitive science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 2009. His primary research interest lies in understanding how cognitive, perceptual, and motor resources are organized and coordinated towards the efficient achievement of goals in the world. Specific research projects include studying how the important features of a visual scene are selected and stored in short-term memory, and investigating how eye movements are coordinated with motor acts in natural tasks. These research questions are addressed through a combination of empirical studies and computational models of ideal performance.
Emin Orhan
Emin is interested in both experimental and computational studies of human learning, with a focus on the problem of perceptual category learning. He uses tools and ideas from machine learning to gain insights into different aspects of human learning at computational, algorithmic, and implementational levels. Sometimes, these ideas from the machine learning literature help him understand experimental findings in human learning research, and sometimes they lead to novel empirical research questions, which he then pursues in the lab. More information about Emin can be found at: http://www.bcs.rochester.edu/people/eorhan/
Ilker Yildirim
Ilker is interested in human learning, perception, and motor control. He tries to understand how human cognitive and perpectual learning work by building computational models which are based on Bayesian statistics and knowledge represantation formalisms such as graphs and logic.