Cornell Cognitive Studies Program

[Shimon Edelman]

                 DEADLINE:  JANUARY 1, 2003

             CORNELL COGNITIVE STUDIES PROGRAM
            Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
               http://www.cogstud.cornell.edu

Cornell professor Ulric Neisser introduced the term "Cognitive
Psychology" in 1967, with a book that gave the name to the field and
helped launch the cognitive revolution.  According to Neisser,
cognitive psychology is the study of how people learn, structure,
store and use information. The Cognitive Studies Program, which
provides the framework for research into human information processing
at Cornell, extends this concept beyond psychology to teaching
students, both graduate and undergraduate, the basics and the latest
developments in the brain/mind sciences. Faculty members affiliated
with the program belong to more than a dozen departments, including
Communication, Computer Science, Design and Environmental Analysis,
Economics, Education, Human Development, Linguistics, Management,
Mathematics, Neurobiology and Behavior, Philosophy, Psychology, and
Sociology. Expanding programs in information science, human-computer
interaction, computational linguistics and vision, and other related
fields are linked to the research activities in Cognitive Studies.

In addition to the spontaneous interactions growing out of common
interests in the nature of the mind, there are more formally
structured aspects to Cognitive Studies at Cornell. These include
campus-wide coordination of cognitive studies activities, and a range
of courses, seminars, and specially organized and funded symposia
and workshops in cognitive sciences.

STUDENTS

We invite inquiries from candidates from a wide range of backgrounds,
including Psychology, Biology, Computer Science, Linguistics and
Philosophy.

As a standard Cornell requirement, every doctoral student must have
two minors, at least one of which must be in an outside graduate
field.  The Cognitive Studies Program does not have its own
Ph.D. program - it encourages students to register in an existing
graduate field - but offers a minor that enables individual students
to shape programs of interdisciplinary study in conjunction with their
major fields.  The goal is to give the students much more than a
superficial exposure to the goals and methodologies of disciplines
other than their own, while recognizing that it is difficult for an
individual to acquire deep expertise in all areas. Each program of
study in Cognitive Studies is therefore based upon depth in one
discipline coupled with an informed appreciation of ideas and tools
selected from other disciplines.

Students should apply to the Cornell Graduate School for admission
into one of the participating departments. Applications can be
submitted online
(see http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/app-request.html).

FINANCIAL SUPPORT

University-sponsored fellowships, typically awarded on the basis of
scholastic ability and promise of achievement, are available through
many of the graduate fields. These fellowships usually cover full
tuition and student health insurance, and provide a nine- or
twelve-month living stipend between $13,000 and $20,000. Subsequent
multi-year support is often guaranteed through assistantships and/or
fellowships. Cornell fellowships are received by 36 percent of
entering doctoral students, 13 percent of entering M.A. and M.S.
students, and 9 percent of the entering students in professional
master's.  The application for university-sponsored fellowships is
part of the application for admission; no additional form is needed.

Another source of funding is through faculty members' research grants.
Most Graduate Research Assistants at Cornell receive a stipend, a full
tuition fellowship, and health insurance, through Cornell's Student
Health Insurance Plan (SHIP).  External fellowships, such as from the
Hughes Foundation or the National Science Foundation also are
available to entering graduate students.  Additional information on
the application processes can be found at
http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/fellowships/exfellow.html

PARTICIPATING FACULTY

(Listings include department and graduate field of each member's
primary appointment(s), followed by other graduate field memberships)

* Kaushik Basu (Economics) - Political economy; knowledge and
  rationality; labor markets in developing economies; game theory

* Lawrence Blume (Economics) - Evolutionary processes in markets and
  games

* John Bowers (Linguistics) - Syntax and semantics of natural language
  and the relationship between the two

* Richard Boyd (Philosophy; Science and Technology Studies) -
  Philosophy of science; philosophy of psychology; epistemology;
  philosophy of language; philosophy of mind

* Claire Cardie (Computer Science) - Developing corpus-based
  techniques for understanding and extracting information from natural
  language texts

* Marianella Casasola (Human Development, Latino Studies) - Aspects of
  infant cognitive development and early word learning and in
  particular, the interaction between cognition and early language
  learning

* Stephen Ceci (Human Development, Psychology) - Theories of
  intelligence; cognitive development; children and the law;
  children's testimonial competence

* Morten Christiansen (Psychology) - Statistical learning of complex
  sequential structure; language acquisition and processing; neural
  network models of language and statistical learning;
  neurophysiological (ERP) measures of statistical learning and
  language; language evolution

* Abigail Cohn (Linguistics, Asian Studies, Romance Studies) -
  Phonetics and phonology, and their interaction

* Christopher Collins (Linguistics) - The syntax of African languages;
  the syntax of English; general issues in syntactic theory

* Robert Constable (Computer Science; Dean for Computing and
  Information Science) - Type theory and automated reasoning

* James Cutting (Psychology) - Perception of motion, depth, and
  layout; event perception; perception of art, cinema and pictures;
  structural and functional analyses of perceptual stimuli

* Richard Darlington (Psychology, Education, Human Development, Public
  Affairs) - Psychometric theory and behavioral statistics;
  differential psychology

* Timothy DeVoogd (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior) - Neural
  plasticity; neurobiology of avian learning; sex differences in
  neuroanatomy and behavior; brain evolution

* Molly Diesing (Linguistics) - Syntax, and the interface between
  syntax and semantics

* James Dunn (Education) - Human learning and memory; cognitive
  psychology; alternative educational systems; seniors and adult
  education; innovative technology transfer; history and systems of
  psychology

* David Dunning (Psychology) - Social cognition: accuracy and error in
  self and social judgment, motivated reasoning, tacit inference
  processes in attitudes and stereotypes; psychology and the law:
  eyewitness identification

* David Easley (Economics) - Economics of information; learning from
  endogenous data; market microstructure; evolution in games and
  markets

* Shimon Edelman (Psychology, Computer Science; Director of Cognitive
  Studies Program) - Computational theories of visual representation
  and recognition; Empiricist theories of language; bridging
  theoretical, behavioral and neurobiological approaches to the study
  of the brain

* Melissa Ferguson (Psychology) - Automatic attitudes, including their
  sensitivity and flexibility across situations and their impact on
  subsequent judgment and behavior; the interface of affect, knowledge
  accessibility, and motivation; social hypothesis testing and
  decision-making

* David Field (Psychology) - Theories and models of sensory coding and
  visual processing; visual perception; emphasis on understanding the
  relations between the structure of the natural environment and the
  representation of that environment by sensory systems

* Barbara Finlay (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior) - Development
  and evolution of the nervous system

* James Gair (Professor Emeritus of Linguistics) - Linguistic
  universals and typology, particularly as they relate to universal
  grammar and linguistic (and mental) representations

* Geraldine Gay (Communication, Education) - Cognitive and social
  issues for the design and use of interactive communication
  technologies

* Thomas Gilovich (Psychology) - Everyday judgment and decision
  making; critical thinking and belief; egocentrism; optimism,
  pessimism, satisfaction, and regret; behavioral economics; gambling

* Carl Ginet (Philosophy) - Metaphysics; epistemology; philosophy of
  mind; philosophy of language

* Delia Graff (Philosophy) - Philosophy of language, and related
  areas, such as logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy
  of mind

* Bruce Halpern (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior) - Human
  olfaction; human taste and smell; effects of aging on chemosensory
  psychophysics

* Joseph Halpern (Computer Science, Applied Mathematics) - Reasoning
  about knowledge and uncertainty; qualitative reasoning;
  (fault-tolerant) distributed computing; logic; game theory

* Wayne Harbert (Linguistics, Germanic Studies, Medieval Studies) -
  Syntactic structures of the Germanic languages and Celtic languages
  and what they can reveal about the principles of syntactic
  organization operating in natural language

* Ronald Harris-Warrick (Neurobiology and Behavior; Physiology) -
  Neuromodulation of neural networks; gene cloning of K+ channels

* Alan Hedge (Design and Environmental Analysis; Environmental
  Toxicology) - Human factors and ergonomics; workplace design; indoor
  environmental quality (IEQ); intelligent buildings

* Benjamin Hellie (Philosophy) - Consciousness; perception;
  predication; and the overlap between these phenomena

* Harold Hodes (Philosophy) - Logic; metaphysics; philosophy of
  language, of mathematics, and of logic

* Howard Howland (Neurobiology and Behavior; Physiology; Psychology;
  Zoology) - Photorefractive methods of determining focusing ability
  of infants and young children; high-order aberrations of the eye;
  and physiological optics in various species, particularly myopia and
  eye growth in chickens

* Ronald Hoy (Neurobiology and Behavior; Entomology) - Animal
  communication; behavior genetics of invertebrates; regeneration and
  development in invertebrate nervous systems

* Daniel Huttenlocher (Computer Science) - Computer vision,
  computational geometry, interactive document systems, electronic
  trading systems, and software development methodologies

* Alice M. Isen (Management, Psychology) - Affect and cognition

* Scott Johnson (Psychology, Human Development) - Visual perception;
  visual and cognitive development, especially in infancy;
  computational models of developmental processes; the
  nativist/empiricist debate, as it pertains to early cognitive and
  perceptual skills

* Robert Johnston (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior) - Neural
  mechanisms of social recognition and memory (i.e., individual, kin,
  species, etc.); animal communication and social behavior; olfaction,
  chemical communication and pheromones; comparative
  cognition/cognitive ethology; evolution of human and animal
  behavior; hormones and behavior

* Barbara Koslowski (Human Development, Psychology) - Cognitive
  development; scientific reasoning; conceptual development; problem
  solving and reasoning

* Carol Krumhansl (Psychology, Music) - Human perception and
  cognition; cognitive processes in music perception and memory;
  experimental, computational, and neuropsychological approaches;
  music theory

* Lillian Lee (Computer Science) - Natural language processing and
  machine learning

* Christiane Linster (Neurobiology and Behavior; Biomedical
  Engineering) - Neural basis of sensory information processing, using
  olfaction as a model system

* Barbara Lust (Human Development, Asian Studies, Linguistics,
  Psychology) - Language and mind, especially first language
  acquisition; linguistic theory of universal grammar; cognitive
  development

* Michael Macy (Sociology) - Collective action; evolutionary game
  theory; deviance and social control; social psychology; social
  exchange theory; rational choice

* Sally McConnell-Ginet (Linguistics; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality
  Studies) - Formal approaches to natural language meaning, especially
  the syntax-semantics and the semantics-pragmatics interfaces; also
  work on language, gender, and sexuality interactions

* Helene Mialet (Science and Technology Studies) - Sociology and
  anthropology of science; continental philosophy of science;
  cognition; notions of subjectivity; self-fashioning; relations
  between humans and machines; and processes of innovation, discovery
  and creativity in science/industry

* Amanda Miller-Ockhuizen (Linguistics) - Phonetics;
  phonetics-phonology interface; African languages

* Ulric Neisser (Emeritus Professor of Psychology) - Memory
  (especially recall of life events); and intelligence (especially IQ
  tests and their social significance)

* Anil Nerode (Mathematics, Applied Mathematics, Computer Science) -
  Logic; recursive functions and computability; theoretical computer
  science; hybrid systems; multiple agent autonomous control theory

* Kathleen O'Connor (Management) - Negotiation; effects of individual
  cognition and social context on negotiation performance; work group
  conflicts and decision-making

* Michael Owren (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior) - Evolutionary
  psychology of sound, voice, and speech; nonhuman primate vocal
  communication; speech evolution

* H. Kern Reeve (Neurobiology and Behavior) - Developing and testing
  biologically realistic models of the evolution of cooperation and
  conflict in animal societies

* Elizabeth Adkins Regan (Psychology; Neurobiology and Behavior;
  Physiology) - Animal social behavior; hormones and behavior;
  neuroendocrine mechanisms of avian behavior; mate choice and
  preference

* Richard Ripple (Education) - Educational psychology; psychology of
  adolescence; adult learning and development; the educational
  psychology of creativity

* Steven Robertson (Human Development) - Understanding the emergence
  and transformation of behavioral organization in early development,
  its underlying mechanisms, and its functional significance for the
  fetus and infant

* Mats Rooth (Linguistics) - Computational linguistics and natural
  language semantics

* Carol Rosen (Linguistics, Romance Studies) - Helping to build a
  theory of universal grammar on a broad database; finding out what
  kinds of formalism can best reveal the regularities in languages

* J. Edward Russo (Management) - Marketing; decision-making and
  decision aiding; consumer behavior; advertising; behavioral science
  in management

* Dawn Schrader (Education; Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies) -
  Lifespan developmental psychology, especially metacognition; moral,
  self and intellectual development in late adolescence and adulthood;
  the relationship between cognition and action; moral education

* Bart Selman (Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Systems
  Engineering) - Knowledge representation; reasoning and search;
  algorithms and complexity; planning; machine learning; cognitive
  science; software agents; connections between computational
  complexity and statistical physics

* Yasuhiro Shirai (Asian Studies, East Asian Literature, Linguistics)
  - Crosslinguistic study of the acquisition of tense-aspect
  morphology, particularly of Japanese; typological study of
  tense-aspect systems; cognitive models of L2 acquisition and use,
  particularly the connectionist model

* Sydney Shoemaker (Philosophy) - Metaphysics and the philosophy
  of mind

* Richard Shore (Mathematics) - Analyzing the structures of relative
  complexity of computation of functions on the natural numbers

* Michael Spivey (Psychology; Human Development; Neurobiology and
  Behavior) - Information integration, both within and between
  perceptual/cognitive systems; experimental and computational
  approaches to: visuolinguistic processing, language comprehension
  and acquisition, eye movements, visual attention

* Zoltan Gendler Szabo (Philosophy) - Philosophy of language;
  metaphysics; formal semantics; pragmatics

* Elise Temple (Human Development, Psychology) - Developmental
  cognitive neuroscience; exploring the brain mechanisms underlying
  cognition in the developing brain; focus on the brain mechanisms of
  reading and language using functional MRI

* Francisco Valero-Cuevas (Aerospace Engineering, Biomedical
  Engineering, Mechanical Engineering) - Neuromuscular biomechanics
  and control; human and robotic manipulation; surgery simulation

* Qi Wang (Human Development) - Development of autobiographical
  memory, self, and emotion knowledge, as well as their interactions

* Elaine Wethington (Human Development, Sociology) - Stress and the
  protective mechanisms of social support

* Jennifer Whiting (Philosophy, Classics) - Personal identity and
  concepts of the self (both ancient and modern), with special
  reference to moral psychology and psychopathology

* John Whitman (Linguistics, Asian Studies, East Asian Literature) -
  The problem of language variation: its limits (how much specific
  subsystems can vary across languages) and predictors (what
  typological features co-occur systematically)

* Stephen Wicker (Electrical and Computer Engineering; Applied
  Mathematics) - Wireless information networks; artificial
  intelligence; error control coding

* Wendy Williams (Human Development) - Practical intelligence and
  tacit knowledge in children and adults; educational policy issues;
  creativity training

* Ramin Zabih (Computer Science) - Computer vision; medical imaging

* Draga Zec (Linguistics) - Phonological theory; a study of the
  principles that govern the patterning of sound in individual
  languages, as well as cross-linguistically

Associate Members:

* Richard Canfield (Nutritional Science) - Cognitive development and
  neurotoxicology in human infants and children

* Susan Hertz (Linguistics) - Speech synthesis, both as an end in and
  of itself and as a vehicle to learn more about various aspects of
  speech, including timing patterns, language universals, perception,
  intonation, and the phonology-phonetics interface

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Application materials can be obtained from the Cornell Graduate School
(http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/app-request.html).

The deadlines for completed application materials vary by field, the
earliest being January 1, 2003.  See individual field listings at the
Graduate School web site for other dates.

For more information about applying to the Cornell Graduate Program:
http://www.gradschool.cornell.edu/grad/default.html.


For more information about graduate study in Cornell's Cognitive
Studies Program, please contact the Director of Graduate Studies and
Director of the Program, Shimon Edelman (se37 at cornell.edu), or the
Program Coordinator, Linda LeVan (cogst at cornell.edu).

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Shimon Edelman
Professor,  Dept. of Psychology, 232 Uris Hall
Director,    Cornell Cognitive Studies Program
Cornell University, Ithaca, NY 14853-7601, USA
Web:  http://kybele.psych.cornell.edu/~edelman

Rationalists do it by the rules.
Empiricists  do it to the rules.