Research Opportunities

More than a dozen active laboratories in the department focus on topics such as the physiology of taste and preference formation, children's acquisition of spatial knowledge, transactive knowledge in organizations, implicit learning in cognitive disorders, visual functions in Down syndrome, creativity and cognition in the arts, cognition without a spine (e.g., in octopus), hippocampal atrophy in early Alzheimer's disease, implicit impression formation, Darwinian models of mate selection, biomemetic robotics, neurodegeneration in the aged and implicit social cognition.

All labs are well equipped and many have attracted funding from NSF, NIH, NASA, DARPA and other organizations. Several faculty members have appointments and working collaborations with research labs in city hospitals and medical schools with access to frontier technologies such as fMRI.

Sign Up for Research Participation

Undergraduate students who are currently taking the Introduction to Psychology course may sign up for research participation.

Faculty Research Areas

Comparative/Animal/Bio/Neuroscience

computational neuroscience; behavioral neuroscience; integration of neural populations in cognitive function; neural networks; basic behavioral sciences
animal behavior; pavlovian mechanisms; biomimetic and cognitive robotics
biopsychology of appetite; food preferences, obesity in humans and laboratory animals; physiology of feeding

Applied/Clinical/Neuroscience

clinical neuropsychology;cognitive neuroscience; neurohormones; human behavior genetics
abnormal psychology; neurodevelopment of psychopathology, cognitive/neuropsychological functioning, and early risk factors in the development of psychopathology
cognitive changes associated with early stages of dementia; psychological dysfunction in neuro-degenerative disease; cognitive remediation
biological basis of antisocial behavior

Cognitive

associative learning; learning in food preferences; cognitive foundations of complex learning; implicit learning; knowledge acquisition in communication; extinction
cognitive development; language development
thinking; language; memory; hypermnesia; metacognition
motivation; cognitive and motivational interactions; psychodynamic aspects of cognition, subliminal processes, defense mechanisms
cognitive studies of creativity, expertise in visual arts
social cognition
neural mechanisms of associative memory
memory and attention in skilled performance

Basic Sensory Processes

sensory systems, psychophysics
vision, color vision; marine chemical senses & olfaction; visual psychophysiology
sensory/perceptual development in infants; aging and vision, life-span changes
spatial-temporal contrast sensitivity; stereopsis

Personality/Social-organizational

social psychology; social cognition, social identification, self-concept, prejudice and stereotyping; attitudinal ambivalence; sex differences; social interaction; communication; groups research, transactive knowledge systems
industrial and organizational psychology, organizational psychology
evolutionary psychology; mate selection; human mating
personality; interpretation of dreams and jokes