Program
Description
part 1 of 2
The Experimental Cognition Subprogram (EC) continues to make its curriculum more responsive to the rapid developments in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive neuropsychology, psycholinguistics, and complex cognition, developments that make these fields among the most significant in the life sciences. From its inception, EC has had a strong neuroscience orientation, first as defined by the field of physiological psychology, and then subsequently by psychophysiology, neuropsychology, cognitive neuropsychology, and cognitive neuroscience. In the past decade, as cognitive neuropsychologists began to take positions in the major research medical institutions, substantial research funding moved from universities to medical research institutions. Collaboration with our colleagues in these institutions, once a useful asset, has now become essential for a contemporary cognition Ph. D. program. During the past 4 years, EC has aggressively revised its collaborative links to research medical units in the NYC area. The primary result of this effort has been the development of strong working link with the Prof. John Foxe, Head of the Cognitive Neurophysiology Laboratory, and with Prof. Emeritus Walter Ritter, at the Nathan S. Kline Institute for Psychiatric Research, and the Cognitive Neuroscience & Schizophrenia Program, at Orangeburg, New York. Prof. Foxe has not only helped to pioneer the simultaneous recording of fMRI and ERPs during bi-sensory cognitive tasks, but he has begun to provide intensive supervision, training, and funding to several EC students, and in addition, is teaching advanced brain imaging seminars at CCNY. The seminars feature leading cognitive neuroscientists in the NYC area. Together with Profs. Hilary Gomes, Vivien Tartter, Diana Deacon, and Jay Edelman (EC and Neuroscience) at CCNY, and Adjunct Profs. Crawford Clark, Yaakov Stern and Dave Friedman, at New York State (NYS) Psychiatric Institute (PI), these cognitive neuroscientists provide a first rate research and training base for EC. Furthermore, hiring additional faculty in this area is a high priority in the Psychology Department.
Much of the influence of cognitive psychology on its neighbors, such as developmental, social, educational and clinical psychology, comes from analysis of the first 1000 ms of stimulus processing. The accuracy of the measurement of these processes, and the success in mapping them onto neural processes, provides a strong foundation for studying macro-cognitive processes, such as language learning, person recognition, perceptual bias, intelligence, attentional processes, goal directed processing and affect, B which may be collectively represented as complex cognition. Although the term, cognition, has been used in these neighboring fields for many years, its usage has had little in common with its meaning in experimental cognitive psychology or cognitive neuroscience. For many years, this discontinuity has been largely ignored because there was no clear basis for translating the precise, but reductive concepts of micro-cognitive psychology into these macro concepts. Recently, however, as the experimental tools and theoretical models of contemporary cognition have become more sophisticated, it has become progressively easier to map complex cognitive processes onto micro-cognitive and neurocognitive models (For e.g., see the connectionist and complementary learning models of Rumelhart , McClelland, O'Reillyand their colleagues).
Part 2