COGNITION AND PERCEPTION AREA: PHILOSOPHY AND APPROACH

The members of the Cognition and Perception training area at the University of Iowa share a philosophy and perspective that distinguish us from cognitive areas in other psychology departments. Our philosophy incorporates a dual insistence on empirical rigor and theoretical development. Our perspective emphasizes an integrative approach to the study of our various domains of inquiry.

Our philosophical stance is reflected in a commitment to hard-nosed empiricism -- careful, cutting edge experimental research. However, we are also committed to theory-building, and our programs of research are thus theory-driven rather than data-driven. We have, for instance, proposed empirically grounded computational theories of aspects of visual attention, procedural memory, spatial working memory, and working memory and lexical learning. Our dual emphasis on theory and data is exemplified in the representative publications we have authored. This philosophical orientation leads us to be skeptical of, for instance, neuroimaging studies that simply try to link a brain region with a cognitive process, and of computational models that do not account for specific empirical phenomena.

Our integrative perspective is reflected in both the content and the methodologies of our research programs. Our research programs span traditional content areas of cognitive psychology. Thus one research program within our area spans the areas of visual perception, visual attention, and visual working memory; another spans spatial perception, spatial attention, action planning, and working memory; a third cuts across the areas of social cognition biases, decision making, and judgment and uncertainty.

Our research programs also employ multiple methodologies and levels of investigation. Thus one research program in our area aims to link language learning with both long-term and short-term memory systems at behavioral, computational, and neural levels of investigation; another research program employs behavioral and electrophysiological techniques to study attention and perception at a psychological and neural level; a third combines behavioral experimentation with dynamical system modeling in investigating the nature of spatial working memory. Finally, several of us span boundaries between adult cognitive psychology and/or developmental psychology and/or cognitive neuroscience. These integrative perspectives are also reflected in our representative publications.

Each laboratory's research program overlaps considerably with the research programs of other laboratories, and most content areas are studied by multiple laboratories and with multiple methodologies. This leads to an unusually high degree of interaction among laboratories, and it provides graduate students with many opportunities to work with multiple faculty members on a single topic. For example, a student might study a given issue with three different faculty members using multiple methodologies, including traditional cognitive experiments, neuropsychological testing with brain-damaged patients, electrophysiological recordings, computational modeling, and developmental studies.