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 12 - Brett Gibson

Brett Gibson is an associate professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire.

Brett imagining a better year for Thomas Vanek

While he may live in Bruin territory he is a Minnesota Wild fan, and he received his BA in psychology from the University of Minnesota in 1991, followed by his MS from Bucknell 1995 and his PhD at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, in 1999.  (Brett also did a postdoc with my PhD supervisor, Sara Shettleworth and one with Ed Wasserman).

Brett is broadly interested in the evolution of behaviour and cognition in non-human animals and the neurobiological underpinnings of these systems. He has two primary lines of research. In the first line of work Brett and his students are investigating the behaviour and cognitive abilities of non-human animals. In particular, they are interested how a variety of animals represent and plan movements in space. Their work in animal cognition also has included research on a wider variety of cognitive abilities, such as numerical ability, inference, and memory in birds, including the Clark’s nutcracker (Nucifraga Columbiana). In the second line of research he has been collaborating with other researchers in the neurosciences to use electrophysiology to record from individual/populations of neurons as animals perform cognitive tasks. This line of work has included investigating the neural systems involved in representations of space, as well as how different part of the brain, like the prefrontal cortex and thalamus are involved in planning actions and movements.

We talked about what got Brett into the field in the first place, about working with people like Sara, Al and Ed, and about his lab's recent work on head direction cells in rats and on numerical cognition in Clark's nutcrackers.


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 11 - Michael Brown

Mike, the pole box, and a rat

Michael Brown is a professor of psychology at Villanova University in Villanova, PA, which is just outside of the home of the evil Philadelphia Flyers.....

Mike got his BA in psychology and philosophy at the University of Michigan and then went on to UC Berkley where he got his PhD in psychology.

Mike's interests are in the general areas of comparative cognition and animal learning. He uses the results of behavioral experiments to make inferences about the systems controlling simple behavior and behavioral change. During the past decade, his efforts have been focused on spatial memory in rats and bees. Mike and his students  have studied rats in several laboratory procedures, including the radial-arm maze. They are interested in determining the nature of the representations and decision processes used in spatial tasks. Their bee research centers on working memory for spatial locations in honeybees and bumblebees. This work has been supported by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation.

We talked about a bunch of stuff including what got Mike into the field, working with Al Riley, and Mike's work on same different learning in bees and social learning in rats.



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 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 4 - Noam Miller

Noam Miller is an assistant professor of psychology at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada where he runs the collective cognition lab.

He's probably modelling something right now

Noam has a B.Sc. in Biology from Tel-Aviv University and – for some reason – also a degree in music (I suspect that reason is because he is a pretty good musician) . He did his PhD in Psychology at the University of Toronto, working with Sara Shettleworth on geometry learning and with Robert Gerlai on schooling in zebrafish. For those of you scoring at home, I did my PhD with Sara and Robbie helped me load the moving truck when I left Sara's lab to move to UWO to do a postdoc. It is interesting how I can pretty much spin anything into something about me isn't it?

He then did a post-doc with Iain Couzin in the Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Department at Princeton University. He is interested in how being in a group shapes cognition, especially learning, and in zebrafish cognition generally.

Noam and I talked about a lot of different things, including the mathematical model of spatial reorientation that he published along with Sara, his recent theoretical paper about collective learning and a pretty cool empirical one on the same topic. In all of this work you can definitely see the influence of the Rescorla Wagner model.

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 2 - Neil McMillan

Neil, telling us things at CO3

Neil McMillan is a postdoctoral researcher in the psychology department at the University of Alberta.  Neil completed his undergraduate degree (a BSc(Hons)) in 2007 with Angelo Santi at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, ON and then moved on to graduate school at the University of Western Ontario.  He completed his MSc and later his PhD (in 2013) under the supervision of Bill Roberts.  We have something in common there as I did a postdoc with Bill Roberts back in the mid 90s.

We talked about a few things in this episode, including my bizarre inability to remember Neil's name for like the past 3 years.

Of course we talked science too.  Neil is interested in spatial memory and so am I.  That said, no matter what, timing keeps pulling him back in.  He also is first author of a pretty cool review paper that you should check out.  We talked about hierarchical representations and cue conflict experiments as well, which I am quite fond of....

His recent JEP paper with his two postdoc supervisors was another topic that we got in to, they have found an effect in reversal learning that you should read about.

Finally, we also talked about the future of the discipline.

Thanks again to Red Arms for the background closing music.  Buy their music now.



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