Colloquia & Current Events |
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There are no future events at this time. You can check the Past Events Page for a listing of recent past events. Be sure to check back later for updates. Read more » |
Alan Christensen Begins Term as President of the Society of Behavioral MedicineWednesday, Apr 18th 2012 The Society of Behavioral Medicine is dedicated to improving health by understanding interactions between behavior, biology, and the environment. Alan Christensen is now serving as President of the
society. Two Psychology Graduate Students Awarded NSF FellowshipsTuesday, Apr 10th 2012 Graduate Students Caitlin Hilliard and Edmarie Guzman-Velez have each been awarded prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships. The program supports outstanding Ph.D. students in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. Caitlin works with Professor Susan Wagner Cook. She studies how hand gesture facilitates communication between conve... Read more » |
Recent research by Larissa Samuelson, John Spencer, and Lynn Perry at Iowa, along with Linda Smith at Indiana University, suggests that young childrens' ability to use social cues in service of word learning my have its basis in basic mechanisms of spatial memory. Infants presented with an ambiguous naming situation were able to use spatial location to link a name to a novel object even when the name and object were separated in time. The researchers also found that parents use consistency in space to help their children learn new words. The importance of spatial consistency and its role in binding names to objects was predicted by a neural field model of working memory that uses a computer to simulate the brain processes at work as children learn words. The paper was published in PLoS One and covered in Science News. |