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The lab conducts research in three areas of cognitive psychology. Click to find out more.
Animal Cognition
Extensive research has explored humans' capacities to monitor their uncertainty and respond adaptively to it. We ask whether animals have similar capacities. The problem for this research is that uncertainty paradigms designed for humans do not suit animals, because they rely on verbal self-reports about doubt and confidence. So instead we use nonverbal paradigms that give animals difficult perceptual and memory problems while also giving them a response that lets them escape the trials they choose. There are strong similarities in the way that humans, dolphins, and monkeys use this uncertainty response (Shields, Smith, & Washburn, 1997; Smith, Schull, Strote, McGee, Egnor, & Erb, 1995; Smith, Shields, Schull, & Washburn, 1996; Smith, Shields, Allendoerfer, & Washburn, 1998).
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Categorization
We are interested in how people learn and use categories. Specifically, we are interested in the representations that underlie humans' categories, and whether these are more often prototype based (Homa, Posner, Keele, Reed, Rosch, etc.) or exemplar based (Medin, Nosofsky, Hintzman, etc.). Our research and our formal modeling studies suggest tasks and occasions when prototype-based descriptions have an important role to play in explaining categorization performance. For example, prototype-based descriptions are most appropriate early in category learning, when the categories are larger and better differentiated, when the stimuli are more complex, and so forth (Smith 2002; Smith & Minda, 2002; Smith & Minda, 2001; Smith & Minda, 2000; Smith & Minda, 1998).
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Music Cognition
Music science has focused on experts' perceptual, cognitive, and aesthetic responses to music. Experts are sensitive to music's melodic/harmonic structure, and their listening preferences reflect this syntactic sensitivity. Novices receive much less empirical attention, and so we focus on them. Novices often seem to be insensitive to music's melodic/harmonic structure, and their listening preferences reflect the value they place on emotional, evocative music, not syntactically intricate music. The contrasts between experts and novices raise interesting questions about music's evolution, its universal structure, and its use and role in cultures Appleton, 1994; Smith & Melara, 1990; Smith & Witt, 1989; Smith, 1987).
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E-mail : Dr. J. David Smith