Cognitive Faculty
Michael R. Dougherty
Kevin Murnane
Kent L. Norman
Thomas S. Wallsten
Ben Bederson
Michael Bunting
Joseph Danks
Henk Haarmann
Ben Shneiderman
Robert Steinman
Todd Troyer
Amanda Woodward
Brief descriptions and two representative publications of program and affiliated faculty members are listed below.
Cognitive Program Faculty
Michael R. Dougherty (Associate Professor) received his Ph.D. from the University of Oklahoma in 1999. His research interests lie in behavioral decision theory, in particular in applying cognitive theories to study judgment and decision making. Most recently, his research has focused on developing an integrative theoretical framework to describe the processes involved with diagnostic hypothesis generation, probability judgment, and hypothesis testing. (http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/dougherty).
Dougherty, M. R. P. & Hunter, J. E. (2003). Probability judgment and subadditivity: The role of working memory capacity and constrained retrieval. Memory & Cognition, 31, 968 - 982.
Dougherty, M. R. P. (2001). Integration of the ecological and error models of overconfidence using a multiple-trace memory model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 579 - 599.
Kevin Murnane (Associate Professor) received his Ph.D. from Indiana University in 1990. His research interests include human memory, memory embedded in environmental and other contexts, and memory for sources of information.
Murnane, K., Phelps, M. P., Malmberg, K. (1999). Context?]dependent recognition memory: The ICE Theory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 403?]415.
Bayen, U. J., Murnane, K., & Erdfelder, E. (1996). Source discrimination, item detection, and multinomial models of source monitoring. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory and Cognition, 22, 197?]215.
Kent L. Norman (Associate Professor) received his Ph.D. in 1973 from the University of Iowa. His current interests are in cognitive psychology, judgment and decision making, cyber-psychology, and issues in electronic educational environments. Current research includes the development of a theory of cognitive control at the human/computer interface, interface design in support of decision making, cognitive issues in on?]line surveys. He is currently an associate editor for the International Journal of Human?]Computer Studies. (http://www.lap.umd.edu/norman).
Norman, K. L. (2004). Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes: Lab Report. Cognitive Processes. 5, 193-196.
Norman, K. L., Panizzi, E. (2005, in press). Levels of automation and user participation in usability testing. Interacting with Computers.
Thomas S. Wallsten (Professor and Program Director) received his Ph.D. in 1969 from the University of Pennsylvania. He is an Area Director at the Center for Advanced Study of Language. His research is primarily in behavioral decision theory, and focuses on a number of topics related to human choice and judgment. Additional and more recent research interests include issues of performance and analysis across languages and cultures. He is a fellow of Society of Experimental Psychologists, the American Psychological Association, and the American Psychological Society; a former editor of the Journal of Mathematical Psychology, and a former associate editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. (http://www.bsos.umd.edu/psyc/wallsten).
Bearden, J. N. & Wallsten, T. S. (2004). Minerva-DM and Subadditive Frequency Judgments. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 17, 349-363.
Wallsten, T. S., Pleskac, T. J., & Lejuez, C. W. (2005). Modeling behavior in a clinically diagnostic sequential risk-taking task. Psychological Review. To appear.
Affiliate Faculty
Benjamin Bederson (Associate Professor. Department of Computer Science and director of the Human-Computer Interaction Lab at the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies) received his Ph.D. in 1992 from New York University. His work is on information visualization, interaction strategies for large and small devices, digital libraries, and accessibility issues such as voting system usability.
Hourcade, J. P., Bederson, B. B., Druin, A., & Guimbretière, F. (2004) Accuracy, Target Reentry and Fitts’ Law: Performance of Preschool Children Using Mice, Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, New York: ACM, 11, 357-386.
Bederson, B. B., Clamage, A., Czerwinski, M. P., & Robertson, G. G. (2004) DateLens: A Fisheye Calendar Interface for PDAs, Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, New York: ACM, 11, 90-119.
Michael Bunting (Assistant Research Scientist, Center for Advanced Study of Language; CASL) received his Ph.D. in 2003 from the University of Illinois at Chicago. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Missouri in Nelson Cowan’s lab prior to joining the staff at CASL. His research examines the nature and organization of working memory and selective attention and their roles in human aptitude and acquired abilities, including reasoning and general intelligence, complex skill acquisition, and language processing and learning. He is an experimental and differential psychologist, incorporating behavioral experiments and individual differences analyses in his research.
Bunting, M. (in press). Proactive interference and item similarity in working memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory & Cognition.
Bunting, M., Conway, A. R. A., & Heitz, R. P. (2004). Individual differences in the fan effect and working memory capacity. Journal of Memory & Language, 51, 604-622.
Joseph Danks (Research Professor, Center for Advanced Study of Language) received his Ph.D. in 1968 from Princeton University. His research investigates the cognitive processes involved in translation and interpreting, that is, how the typical cognitive processes underlying comprehension and production are adapted for these multilingual tasks. Another research area investigates how elderly patients communicate their wishes for end-of-life medical treatments and then how family and physicians interpret those communications.
Danks, J. H., & Griffin, J. (1997). Reading and translation: A psycholinguistic perspective. In Danks, J. H., Shreve, G. M., Fountain, S. B., & McBeath, M. K. (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting (pp. 161-175). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.
Ditto, P. H., Danks, J. H., Smucker, W. D., et al. (2001). Advance directives as acts of communication: A randomized control trial. Archives of Internal Medicine, 161, 421-430.
Henk J. Haarmann (Associate Research Scientist, Center for Advanced Study of Language) received his Ph.D. in 1993 from the University of Nijmegen in The Netherlands. His research interests include cognitive neuroscience, cognitive control mechanisms governing the processing of meaning in complex language tasks and their brain basis, Basic and applied research to help improve the jobs of foreign language professionals.
Haarmann, H.J., & Cameron, K.A. (2005). Active maintenance of sentence meaning in working memory: Evidence from EEG coherences. International Journal of Psychophysiology (special issue on coherence and cognition), 57, 115-128.
Haarmann, H.J., Ashling, G.E., Davelaar, E.J., & Usher, M. (2005). Age-related declines in context maintenance and semantic short-term memory. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology (special issue on aging), 55A (1), 34-53.
Paul Hanges (Professor, Department of Psychology, Industrial-Organizational Psychology Program) received his Ph. D. 1986 from the University of Akron. His research touches on applied topics in cognition and research methodology. In terms of cognition, the majority of his work has focused on building models to understand social perceptions (e.g., leadership) and the factors (e.g., societal culture, gender stereotypes, personality) that cause these perceptions to stabilize or change over time.
Bliese, P.D. & Hanges, P.J. (2004). Being both too liberal and too conservative: The perils of treating grouped data as though it is independent. Organizational Research Methods, 7, 400-417.
House, R.J., Hanges, P.J., Javidan, M., Dorfman, P.W., & Gupta, V. (2004). Leadership, Culture, and Organizations: The GLOBE study of 62 societies. Sage Publications
Erica B. Michael (Assistant Research Scientist, Center for Advanced Study of Language) received her Ph.D. in 1998 from The Pennsylvania State University. Her research focuses on bilingualism and second language acquisition, with an emphasis on lexical and semantic processing. In particular, she is interested in the relationships between cognitive control, working memory, and language processing.
Michael, E. B., & Gollan, T. (2005). Being and becoming bilingual: Individual differences and consequences for language production. In J. F. Kroll & A. M. B. de Groot (Eds.), Handbook of bilingualism: Psycholinguistic approaches (pp. 389-407). New York: Oxford University Press.
Tokowicz, N., Michael, E. B., & Kroll, J. F. (2004). The roles of study abroad experience and working memory capacity in the types of errors made during translation. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 7, 255-272
Ben Shneiderman (Professor, Department of Computer Science) received his Ph.D. in 1973 from SUNY-Stony Brook. His research focuses on human-computer interaction with the dual goals of understanding human performance with information and communications technologies and improving the design of interfaces for these products. He and his students design and conduct empirical evaluations of desktop, web-based, and mobile interfaces, with an eye to creating universally usable technologies.
Hochheiser, H. and Shneiderman, B. (2004). Dynamic query tools for time series data sets, Timebox widgets for interactive exploration, Information Visualization 3, 1-18.
Ceaparu, I., Lazar, J., Bessiere, K., Robinson, J., and Shneiderman, B. (2004). Determining causes and severity of end-user frustration. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction 17, 333-356.
Robert Steinman (Professor, Department of Psychology, Sensory-Neural and Perceptual Processes Program) received his Ph.D. in 1994 from the New School University. His research interests lie in human oculomotor control, including the role of eye movements in cognitive and perceptual processes. http://brissweb.umd.edu/RMS%27CV.html
Steinman, R.M. (2003) Gaze Control Under Natural Conditions in The Visual Neurosciences, edited by Chalupa, L.M. & Werner, J.S.; MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 1339-1356.
Steinman, R. M., Pizlo, Z. & Pizlo, F. J. (2000) Phi is not beta, and why Wertheimer's discovery launched the Gestalt revolution: Mini Review. Vision Research, 40, 2257-2264.
Todd Troyer (Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Sensory-Neural and Perceptual Processes Program) received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California- Berkeley in 1993. His research interests center on the representation and control of sequential patterns in neural networks and on song learning in birds.
Todd W. Troyer and Allison J. Doupe. An associational model of birdsong sensorimotor learning. I. Efference copy and the learning of song syllables. Journal of Neurophysiology, 84(3):1204-1223, 2000.
Kenneth D. Miller and Todd W. Troyer. Neural noise can explain expansive, power-law nonlinearities in neural response functions. Journal of Neurophysiology, 87(2):653-659, 2002.
Scott Weems (Assistant Research Scientist, Center for Advanced Study of Language) received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 2003. His research interests focus on language representation, particularly in how the two cerebral hemispheres contribute to the storage and recall of linguistic information. He addresses this goal using a converging methodologies approach, combining behavioral experiments, electroencephalographic monitoring (EEG), and neural network modeling.
Weems, S., Zaidel, E., Berman, S., and Mandelkern, M. (2004). Asymmetry in alpha power predicts accuracy of hemispheric lexical decision, Clinical Neurophysiology, 115(7), 1575-1582.
Weems, S. and Reggia, J. (2004). Hemispheric specialization and independence for word recognition: a comparison of three computational models, Brain and Language, 89(3), 554-568.
Amanda Woodward (Professor, Department of Psychology, Developmental Psychology Program) received her Ph.D. in 1992 from Stanford University. She was a post doctoral fellow at Cornell University and a faculty member at the University of Chicago before joining the faculty at Maryland in 2005. Her research has been recognized by several awards including the John Merck Fund Young Scholars Award (1994), the APA Boyd McCandless Award (2000) and a James McKeen Cattell Sabbatical Fellowship (2003-2004). She is a fellow in Division 7 of the American Psychological Association and serves as an Associate Editor for the APA journal Developmental Psychology. Her research investigates infant social cognition and early language development.
Woodward, A. L. (2005). The infant origins of intentional understanding. In R. V. Kail (ed.) Advances in Child Development and Behavior, Volume 33. Oxford: Elsevier.
Sommerville, J. A., Woodward, A. L., & Needham, A. (2005).Action experience alters 3-month-old infants' perception of others’ actions. Cognition, 96, B1–B11
Emeritus Faculty
Nancy S. Anderson (Professor Emerita) received her Ph.D. in 1956 from Ohio State University. Her research interests are in human memory, cognition and pattern perception. She is a past president of the Eastern Psychological Association, a past member of the American Psychological Association Board of Directors, and a founder of the American Psychological Society. She is a fellow of those associations, as well as of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.