Department Cognitive Science Vassar College is dedicated to providing equal employment opportunities to all applicants and employees and welcomes applications from individuals of all backgrounds. Deci...

Workshop Description Chess presents an intriguing case study in complex decision-making and multi-step planning. Historically, the psychology underlying chess play has been a topic of great interest,...

People routinely choose between multi-attribute options, such as which movie to watch. Here, the authors show people often have accurate insight into their choices, challenging the notion that people ...

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Research on human navigation by psychologists and neuroscientists has come mainly from a limited range of environments and participants inhabiting western countries. By contrast, numerous anthropological accounts illustrate the diverse ways in which cultures adapt to their surrounding environment to navigate. Here, we provide an overview of these studies and relate them to cognitive science research. The diversity of cues in traditional navigation is much higher and multimodal compared with navigation experiments in the laboratory. It typically involves an integrated system of methods, drawing on a detailed understanding of the environmental cues, specific tools, and forms part of a broader cultural system. We highlight recent methodological developments for measuring navigation skill and modelling behaviour that will aid future research into how culture and environment shape human navigation.

Xie Lab for Social Cognitive Science

This manuscript gives a big-picture, up-to-date overview of the field of (deep) reinforcement learning and sequential decision making, covering value-based RL, policy-gradient methods, model-based met...

The algorithm of the prefrontal working memory system on sequence memory tasks is not well understood, whereas it is well understood for the hippocampal episodic memory system. This work shows a mathematical duality between working and episodic sequence memory. This leads to a computational understanding of sequence working memory—as structured activity slots. This theory algorithmically explains recurrent neural network (RNN) and prefrontal representations during sequence memory tasks.