Episode 20 (Season 2, Episode 1) - Jenna Congdon

Jenna was wearing PPE before it was cool

YES THE PODCAST IS BACK!

I'm really happy to be back doing these.  They take some time, so I waited until my next sabbatical.  Well, my next sabbatical is NOW.  Look, OK, I'm pretty psyched for this, but let's not make this all about me.

We open up season 2 with Jenna Congdon, who is a postdoc at York University, working with Suzanne MacDonald (who you may remember from such podcasts as 'Spit and Twitches, the Animal Cognition Podcast').

We talked some about her PhD work as well as side projects.  We also talked about her current work at the Toronto Zoo.

Jenna started out her career as a biology student at Algoma University in Sault Ste. Marie, ON.  Coincidentally, I work there!  She switched over to psychology, what the cool kids take, when she took an elective with a frenetic but brilliant intro psych prof (me).  Actually, I'm a bit of a hack, don't tell anyone.  After completing her honours thesis project with me she moved on to bigger and brighter things, working with Chris Sturdy at the University of Alberta.  She got her PhD in 2019 and has been teaching as a part time faculty member at Concordia University of Edmonton and at the University of Alberta.  

She's currently working with Suzanne MacDonald, as I noted above. Look, I haven't written one of these things in a while, and, well, I'm out of practice...

As always, thanks to Red Arms for allowing me to mash up their music in the closing theme, BUY THEIR MUSIC.

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Episode 16 - Eric Legge

Hey look, it's Eric's Facebook pic!

Eric Legge is a part time instructor at the University of Alberta and at McEwan University, both in Edmonton Alberta.

Look, I've known Eric since he was 17.  I taught him intro psych at the Memorial University of Newfoundland's Genfell campus in Corner Brook, and he worked in my lab while there.  Indeed, I am pretty sure that was the highlight of his career and everything after that was downhill.

Actually, Eric went on to grad school at the University of Alberta and worked with Marcia Spetch.  (I may have written him a letter of recommendation for that, one sec...)  Yes I did write him a letter, in that I told the story of Eric carrying around a little notebook called 'research ideas' everywhere.  One day in my learning class he and I got into a discussion and we designed three experiments.  Then we both realized we had lost the class and I went back to talking about the Rescorla-Wagner model.

We talked about Eric's work on searching for hidden objects in adult humans, his very cool ant navigation stuff and his early stuff on the hierarchical organization of cues in pigeons (I think I was reviewer B on that one...)



Thanks again to Red Arms for letting me mash up their music in the closing theme, buy their music now.

mp3 download