Program Highlights

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Recent Highlights

Foundations Fest, October 17-18, 2024, a two-day workshop in honor of Ray Jackendoff: It’s both not exactly the 20th anniversary of his foundational “Foundations of Language” book, and not exactly his 80th birthday, but close enough that we decided to celebrate!

The Integrative Cognitive Neuroscience (ICoN) Lab recently published an article entitled "Leveraging prior knowledge to support short-term memory: Exploring the role of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex” in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience (July 2023).

Ray Jackendoff: in 2023, a book in was published in Japanese, entitled , “Jackendoff no Shiso: Gengo to Kokoro no Kenkyu (Jackendoff’s Thought: His Studies on Language and Mind)”, by Mitsuaki Yoneyama of Seikei University in Japan.

May 2023, Ray Jackendoff gave a plenary address at the International Conference on Construction Grammar, in Prague.

In June and July 2023, Ray Jackendoff came out of retirement to teach a course at the Linguistic Society of America’s Summer Institute, at UMass Amherst.

CogSci grad student Nick Rabb was mentioned in the January 10, 2022 Tufts Now feature 'Computer Model Seeks to Explain the Spread of Misinformation, and Suggest Counter Measures'. Nick described his experience:
"We used cognitive and computational modeling techniques to put forward a simple model of how misinformation may spread in a networked population. Primarily modeling cognitive dissonance (only believing what is close to what you already believe) and exposure (hearing a message more makes it seem true) effects, we were able to demonstrate that discourse dominated by these phenomena does not follow patterns argued for in much of the rest of the literature. Our model concluded that under these conditions, community structure does not make a significant difference, but any intervention to correct problematic beliefs would need to meet people where they are at and slowly move them to desired beliefs."

Archived Highlights

CogSci student Evana Gizzi won a follow-on grant at NASA for the 2020 research project 'RAISR' (Research in AI for Spacecraft Resilience), in which she served as Principal Investigator. The research ended with elevated excitement from NASA, which included multiple presentations of RAISR across the organization. Evana will be focusing on using the efforts of the 2021 follow-on grant to cultivate collaboration and funding for Tufts University AI research.

In 2020, Professor Matthias Scheutz, Professor J.P. deRuiter and CogSci student Nicholas Rabb secured a grant from the DISC SEED grant program for a COVID misinformation project:
'Using Agent-Based Models to Investigate Countermeasures for False Information Spread'
Team Lead: Matthias Scheutz (SoE)
Team Member: Jan P. deRuiter (A&S)

On October 24, 2020 Psychology professor Aniruddh Patel presented "Music and Gene-Culture Coevolution" at the 2020 CARTA Virtual Symposium titled "Comparative Anthropogeny: Exploring the Human-Ape Paradox."

In August 2020, Proc Natl Acad Sci (PNAS) published "Protecting memory from misinformation: Warnings modulate cortical reinstatement during memory retrieval", by Psychology professors Elizabeth Race and Ayanna Thomas, and graduate students Alia Wulff and McKinzey Torrance.
Read the Tufts Now feature about this paper: 'Warning witnesses of the possibility of misinformation helps protect their memory accuracy.'

In February 2020, Oxford University Press published "The Texture of the Lexicon: Relational Morphology and the Parallel Architecture", by Ray Jackendoff, emeritus Co-Director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, and Jenny Audring.

In Fall 2019, Professor Aniruddh Patel and Professor Mimi Kao (Biology) received an NIH Exploratory/Developmental Research Grant Award 'R21' grant, titled "Developing an animal model to study auditory-motor interactions during rhythm perception." Andrew Rouse, a CogSci grad student who was jointly supervised by Profs. Kao and Patel, was funded by this grant for his research on rhythm perception in zebra finches.

Professor Ray Jackendoff's article "What is the human language faculty? Two views" was selected by a committee of current and former editors of Language, for inclusion in Volume III of the Language Anthology.

J.P. de Ruiter was invited to give the first Jon Oberlander Memorial lecture on December 17, 2018 in Edinburgh, UK.

In Fall 2018, Sepideh Sadeghi successfully defended her PhD thesis on computational models of word learning to earn a combined Computer Science/Cognitive Science degree.

Cognitive Science researchers Matthias Scheutz, J.P. de Ruiter, and Nate Ward were (co)PIs in a new project funded by the Air Force.

CogSci graduate student Felix Gervitz earned a fellowship through NASA (NASA Space Technology Research Fellowship) and spent a summer at Ames Research Center in California with the Intelligent Robotics Group doing really cool research on human-robot teaming and cognitive robotics for space exploration. He plans to spend all his summers there until he graduates!

MIT Press released Professor Richard Chechile's book: Analyzing Memory: The Formation, Retention, and Measurement of Memory. This book contains a systematic examination of memory for single-cell organisms to complex human models of experience.

Professor Elizabeth Race and Professor Ani Patel received a GRAMMY Museum® grant entitled "Orchestrating brain rhythms to enhance memory across the lifespan."