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.

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Episode 15 - Tom Zentall

Thomas Zentall is a professor of psychology at the University of Kentucky.

Tom, the pigeon whisperer

Tom's research interests focus on cognitive behaviours in animals including memory strategies, concept learning, and social learning. The approach Tom and his students  use is to define a cognitive behaviour that is characteristic of humans in a way that clearly distinguishes it from simple associative (SR) learning and then to examine the conditions under which it can be found in animals. This approach not only examines the relatively unexplored repertoire of animal behaviour that has been thought to distinguish humans from other animals, but it also develops relatively simple training techniques that may be useful in training developmentally delayed and learning disabled humans to use concepts and strategies. 

Tom has contributed a great deal to the field of comparative cognition, so much so that the Comparative Cognitiion Society had him give the master lecture at CO3 in 2014.

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

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Episode 5 - Aaron Blaisdell

Aaron Blaisdell is a Professor in Learning & Behavior and Behavioral Neuroscience in the UCLA Psychology Department. He presides over the Comparative Cognition Lab, studying cognitive processes in rats, pigeons, hermit crabs, and humans.

Aaron knows the best way to carry a rat is on your shoulder

After receiving his BA and MA in Biological Anthropology (at SUNY Stony Brook and Kent State University, respectively), Aaron realized that animal cognition was even more interesting than dead humans. So he trekked on over to SUNY Binghamton for his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology with  Ralph Miller, where he studied learning, memory, and temporal cognition in the rat. 

This was followed by a brief stint as an NRSA Postdoctoral Fellow with Bob Cook, an expert on Avian Visual Cognition at Tufts University, where he learned how pigeons perceive and think about the world. In 2001, he emigrated to the climatological and cultural paradise of sunny LA where he has remained ever since. 

A second interest of Aaron’s is in how human ancestry and evolution can inform us about health and well being in the modern world. He is currently studying the interaction between diet and cognition. He is a founding member and Past President of the Ancestral Health Society, Past President of the International Society for Comparative Psychology, an Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Evolution and Health, and a member of the Brain Research Institute, the Integrative Center for Learning & Memory, and the Evolutionary Medicine program all at UCLA.

We talked about a lot of different things, including reasoning in rats, sensory preconditioning, how diet affects cognition, representation in rat memory and Aaron's crowdfunded research proposal.

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



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Episode 3 - Matthew Murphy

Happy Matt

Matthew Murphy is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Salem State University in Massachusetts, and will be a Visiting Assistant Professor at UMass Lowell this upcoming fall, teaching statistics and research methods.

He earned his B.S. in Interdisciplinary Psychology/Biology in 2005 from Southampton College of Long Island University, mentored by Dr. Paul Forestell.  Research experience there included work at the Pittsburgh Zoo & PPG Aquarium, and work at Brookhaven National Laboratories on a NASA-funded project on radiation's effects on auditory cognition.

Matt moved on to Tufts University in Boston where he earned his M.S. in 2009 and Ph.D. in 2014, both in Psychology, under the mentorship of Bob Cook in the Avian Visual Cognition lab.  His work with pigeons included absolute and relational control of auditory sequences, auditory entropy, rule-learning, spatial frequency perception, and intraocular visual memory.

Matt's research interests include intraocular visual memory and self-recognition in animals.

We talked about what got him into the field, why Bob Cook's lab is full of people who give great talks, about a life in science and his dissertation work as well as some of his recent stuff that he just published in JEP with Dan Brooks and Bob Cook.

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



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