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Cognitive Division
Program Description
Members of the Cognitive Division have research programs focused on human memory, language processing, categorization, reasoning, computational modeling, and cognitive aging. The emphasis in the Division is focused on acquiring exceptionally strong research skills in a domain chosen by the student, working closely with individual faculty members and using multiple dependent measures to study a given area. Faculty members and students in the Cognitive Division have research interests and collaborations that overlap with those in every other Division in the Department. In addition to strong intersections with the Visual Cognition and Human Performance and Brain and Cognition Divisions, there are also collaborations with social, developmental, and quantitative psychologists.
Curriculum
The Division has a large array of graduate courses that cover the field of cognitive psychology in an exceptionally comprehensive manner. Students develop a specialized course of study designed to provide expertise in their particular areas of interest, but also acquire breadth in the field through coursework outside the Division and well as through interdisciplinary collaborations. All students complete a first year project that is presented to the faculty at a weekly research seminar attended by all students and faculty in the Division. By the end of the third year, students will have completed the Comprehensive Examination as well as the majority of their course work. The material to be covered on the Comprehensive Examination is jointly decided by the student and his or her faculty advisor. The remaining years in the program are devoted to completing a dissertation, publishing data collected earlier, as well as developing depth and breadth in preparation for a career in academia, industry, or government service, with the majority of students entering academia.
Facilities and Resources
The facilities associated with the Division are superlative. Every faculty member has substantial laboratory space in either the Psychology Department or Beckman Institute dedicated to his or her research program. All students have access to a vast array of state of the art technologies and methodologies as well as a high end computing environment. Tools available to study cognition, in addition to traditional behavioral methods, include a research-dedicated head only 3 Tesla scanner for functional neuroimaging, as well as optical imaging, EEG/ERP, and eye-tracking. Students have access to many different subject populations, including older adults, children, and clinic populations. The technical resources available to students in the Cognitive Division are among the most comprehensive and best in the world for the study of human cognition.
Affiliated Departments, Programs, and Institutes
All members of the Cognitive Division have appointments in the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. In addition, faculty members collaborate with faculty members in other Departments at UIUC, including Linguistics, Engineering, Educational Psychology, Kinesiology, the Genomics Institute, and the Institute of Aviation. Cross-cultural research opportunities for the study of cognition are also available in China and Singapore.
Cognitive Division Faculty| Aaron S. Benjamin (Associate Professor) |  | Human learning, memory, and decision-making | | Office: Room 827 | (217) 333-6822 | asbenjam [at] uiuc [dot] edu |
| J. Kathryn Bock (Professor) |  | How people turn thoughts into speech, including: how the features of ideas affect language forms; what goes wrong when speakers make errors in selecting or arranging words; and the cognitive processes that control how words are arranged. | | Office: Room 811 | (217) 244-1121 | jkbock AT uiuc DOT edu |
| William F. Brewer (Professor) |  | Cognitive psychology; cognitive science; knowledge representation; acquisition of knowledge; discourse; reading comprehension; psychology of science; and history of psychology. | | Office: Room 629 | (217) 333-1548 | wbrewer@uiuc.edu |
| Gary S. Dell (Professor) |  | Language production and comprehension; connectionist models of psycholinguistic phenomena. | | Office: Room 833 | (217) 244-1294 | gdell@cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu |
| Donelson E Dulany (Professor Emeritus) |  | | | Office: Room 421 | (217) 333-2971 | ddulany@uiuc.edu |
| Kara D. Federmeier (Associate Professor) |  | Neurobiological basis of meaning, including how world knowledge derived from multiple modalities is organized in the brain, how it is used during language comprehension, and how it is accessed and used by the two cerebral hemispheres. | | Office: Room 831 | (217) 333-8303 | kfederme AT illinois DOT edu |
| Susan M. Garnsey (Associate Professor & Associate Head for Graduate Affairs) |  | Language processing; resolution of syntactic and lexical ambiguity and context effects on that resolution; the effect of prosody on disambiguation; on-line techniques for measuring language comprehension; word recognition; and language/brain relationships. | | Office: Room 810 | (217) 244-1120 | sgarnsey@psych.illinois.edu |
| John E. Hummel (Professor) |  | Relational processing in perception and cognition. Neurocomputational origins of relational (i.e., symbolic) thought. | | Office: Room 825 | (217) 265-6090 | jehummel AT uiuc DOT edu |
| Brian H. Ross (Professor) |  | Cognitive psychology issues in learning, memory, problem solving and categorization. In particular: problem-solving and learning in complex domains, categorization, learning, and use of concepts. Remindings and the use of memory. | | Office: Room 835 | (217) 333-8745 | bhross@uiuc.edu |
| Duane Watson (Assistant Professor) |  | I am interested in the cognitive processes that underlie language production and comprehension. Specifically, I work on understanding how speakers use stress, pitch, and intonational boundaries to convey information to a listener. | | Office: Room 829 | (217) 333-0280 | dgwatson AT uiuc DOT edu |
Associated Faculty from Other Divisions| Neal J Cohen (Professor) |  | Interdisciplinary, cognitive neuroscience study of human learning and memory, with a focus on identifying and characterizing the brain's multiple memory systems, particularly the hippocampal system, through the study of amnesia. | | Office: Room Beckman 2165 | (217) 244-4339 | njc@uiuc.edu |
| Denise Cummins (Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Philosophy) |  | Evolution and development of higher cognition in artificial and biological systems, particularly causal and social reasoning. | | Office: Room 625 | 333-0373 | dcummins@uiuc.edu |
| Monica Fabiani (Professor) |  | Memory; cognition and aging; neuroimaging; optical imaging; cognitive neuroscience. | | Office: Room 517 | (217) 244-1117 | mfabiani@uiuc.edu |
| Cynthia Fisher (Professor) |  | First language acquisition; psycholinguistics; phonological learning; syntax and word learning. | | Office: Room 619 | (217) 333-3545 | clfishe at uiuc.edu |
| Gabriele Gratton (Professor) |  | Gabriele Gratton's interests are in cognitive neuroscience and attention and performance. | | Office: Room 519 | (217) 244-1019 | grattong@uiuc.edu |
| David E. Irwin (Professor and Head) |  | Visual perception, visual cognition, memory, and language. | | Office: Room 315 | (217) 333-0632 | irwin@uiuc.edu |
| Arthur F. Kramer (Professor) |  | Cognitive neuroscience, cognition & aging, selective attention, skill acquisition and training, human factors. | | Office: Room 515 | (217) 333-9532 | akramer@cyrus.psych.uiuc.edu |
| Alejandro Lleras (Assistant Professor of Psychology) |  | Interplay between visual awareness, attention and memory systems; between perception and action; and embodied cognition. | | Office: Room 523 | (217) 265-6709 | alleras@uiuc.edu |
| Edward J. Shoben (Professor Emeritus) | | | | | Office: Room 512 CBC, UNLV | (702) 895-0193 | eshoben@cyrus.uiuc.edu |
| Daniel J. Simons (Professor) |  | Visual cognition, perception, attention, and memory. Much of my research focuses on successes and failures of visual awareness, including change blindness and inattentional blindness. | | Office: Room 807 | (217) 333-7628 | dsimons AT uiuc DOT edu |
| Jesse Spencer-Smith (Assistant Professor) |  | Prof. Spencer-Smith studies the geometric structure and dynamic properties of psychological spaces. Emotional facial expressions is one area in which he studies and models people*s perceptions using these mathematical tools. | | Office: Room 425 | (217) 265-5493 | jbspence@uiuc.edu |
Other Affiliates from Other Departments
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