Cognitive and Brain Sciences (CAB)

CAB Faculty 2024
Top row: Steve Engel, Randy Fletcher, Kurt Fraser, Nicola Grissom, Dan Kersten, Wilma Koutstaal
Bottom row: Vanessa Lee, Gordon Legge, Cheryl Olman, Andrew Oxenham, Paul Schrater, Iris Vilares, Amanda Woodward

The Cognitive and Brain Sciences (CAB) program trains the next generation of scientists to advance our understanding of cognitive and perceptual behavior and its underlying neural bases. Our training program is committed to developing student knowledge and skills that span disciplines. Research in the CAB program is organized around two main areas:

  • Cognition: affective neuroscience, learning, memory, and decision-making
  • Perception: computational, neural, and behavioral aspects of vision and hearing, including sensory loss 

CAB faculty are highly collaborative, offering opportunities to work across labs within Psychology. Additionally, our faculty work closely with labs in other areas at the University, including clinical psychology, behavior genetics, child development, computer science, neuroscience, educational psychology, neurology, communication disorders, the Center for Applied and Translational Sensory Science (CATSS), and the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research (CMRR).

Our program encourages applications from individuals with backgrounds in relevant areas of psychology (e.g., perception, cognition, learning, behavioral neuroscience), as well as those who have backgrounds in related fields such as biology, neuroscience, computer science, statistics, engineering, and mathematics.

Curriculum

Students take courses and seminars that cover a variety of topics pertaining to Cognitive and Brain Sciences, both within Psychology and in other departments, such as Statistics, Computer Science and Engineering, and Neuroscience. Visit the Graduate Education Catalog: Psychology for curriculum requirements specific to the CAB program. 

Research

Students are involved in intensive research throughout their graduate training, beginning with a first-year research project and culminating in a dissertation that will usually reflect the body of work completed throughout their program. The CAB area has numerous labs that employ a wide range of experimental methods aimed at advancing our knowledge of the neural and psychological mechanisms underlying human behavior. Such methods include, but are not limited to, behavioral measures, computational modeling, pharmacology, genetics, neural recording, electroencephalography (EEG), and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Our students and faculty study topics such as perception, learning and memory, attention, decision-making, creativity, affect, and motivation. Discoveries from CAB are applied widely, informing advances in drug addiction treatment, artificial intelligence, human factors engineering, and clinical hearing and vision loss.

Funding Opportunities

The Department of Psychology offers a variety of funding opportunities to graduate students. For more information, refer to the Funding Opportunities webpage.

How to Apply

Prospective students should apply to the Psychology PhD Program.

Faculty

Core Faculty and Research Areas

Cognition (learning, memory, and decision-making)

  • Charles Randy Fletcher (Associate Professor) - text comprehension, memory for text
  • Kurt Fraser (Assistant Professor) - associative learning, contextual control, motivated behavior, systems neuroscience, dopamine-acetylcholine interactions
  • Nicola Grissom (Associate Professor) - decision-making, sex differences, neurodevelopmental disorders
  • Wilma Koutstaal (Professor) - flexible thinking, memory, creativity
  • Vanessa Lee (Professor) - attention, implicit learning, medical image perception
  • Paul Schrater (Associate Professor) - artificial intelligence, computational neuroscience, cognitive science
  • Iris Vilares (Assistant Professor) - decision-making, neuroeconomics, computational psychiatry

Perception (vision and hearing)

  • Stephen Engel (Professor and Area Director) - visual perception, brain plasticity, neuroimaging
  • Gordon Legge (Distinguished McKnight University Professor) - visual perception, visual impairment, applications of vision science
  • Cheryl Olman (Professor) - fMRI, computational neuroscience, vision
  • Andrew J. Oxenham (Distinguished McKnight University Professor) - auditory perception, hearing loss, neuroimaging

Affiliated Faculty

Emeritus Faculty