Cognitive Science Speaker Series | Theoretical psychology: a view from the trenches

Speaker: Michael L. Kalish Ph.D
Title: Theoretical psychology: a view from the trenches
Short Bio: Professor Dr. Mike Kalish received his BS from Brown, his MS and PhD from UC San Diego all in Cognitive Science. After his postdoc in Mathematical Psychology at Indiana University he took up his first academic position in the School of Psychology at the University of Western Australia. He moved to the Institute for Cognitive Science at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and has been in the Department of Psychology at Syracuse University since 2013. His work has been funded by the Australian Research Council and the National Science Foundation. Trained in connectionist modeling, he has been developing and testing computational models of human cognitive capacities for most of the last 40 years.
Abstract: How people learn to make new categorical discriminations, and how people generalize their knowledge to new items, has been a cornerstone of psychological theory since the dawn of the cognitive revolution. Since the 1990s a contrast has been developed between what are called ‘single system’ and ‘multiple system’ models of human category learning. My career has been spent dissecting this contrast. I will try and showcase the issues that drive my interest, which range from the conceptual to the methodological to the descriptive and explanatory. I will try and show through it all how a deflationary approach to psychological theory can make sense of the task of modeling human category learning.
ASL-English interpreters have been requested. Light refreshments will be provided.
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
Open to the Public
Interpreter Requested?
Yes