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Dr. Charles Doan, William Van Law Plankey Assistant Professor of Psychology at 911������, recently presented research at the ninth annual Midwestern Cognitive Science Conference at Grand Valley State University. 

The research was conducted at 911������ with undergraduate students and involved the recently acquired eye-tracking technology within the Department of Psychology. In particular, Doan reported on new advancements in understanding information processing and factors that affect human learning in the absence of environmental feedback. 

The title of the work was “Using Generalized Invariance Structure Theory to account for sequence effects in unsupervised learning of exclusive-or relations.”

“The work connects such processing and learning to important eye-tracking metrics, such as relative dwell time to information in our environment and how we fixate/attend to different information in our environment as we learn,” Doan said.

Additionally, Doan reported on developments for work conducted in collaboration with researchers at Ohio University that directly connects conceptual cognitive processes with decisional cognitive processes in humans. The title of the work was “Revisiting Hick’s Law: Integrating choice behavior and concept learnability.”

“Importantly, this work highlighted the shortcomings of applying traditional information theory to understanding the intersection of these cognitive capacities, while demonstrating how a theory grounded in relational information and invariance-based conceptual processing overcomes the aforementioned shortcomings,” he said.