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Jobs in Cognitive Psychology

Jobs in Cognitive Psychology. Nancy Alvarado, Ph.D. Assistant Professor. What is Cognitive Psychology?. The study of how people think. Information processing – uses computer analogies to describe thinking.

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Jobs in Cognitive Psychology

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  1. Jobs in Cognitive Psychology Nancy Alvarado, Ph.D. Assistant Professor

  2. What is Cognitive Psychology? • The study of how people think. • Information processing – uses computer analogies to describe thinking. • Cognitive science – human and machine intelligence (includes neuroscience, linguistics, philosophy as well as psychology) • Because mental activity cannot be directly observed, indirect measures are used.

  3. You Can’t Escape It • Clinical psychology uses cognitive approaches to identify and treat pathologies: • Disorders have cognitive symptoms • Therapies address thinking in order to change behavior and emotion • Developmental psychology includes cognitive development, language acquisition. • Social cognition is the cutting edge of social psychology.

  4. My Research Interests • Psychology • Emotion, facial expressions, language used to describe emotional experiences, coping styles. • Color naming, cross-cultural comparisons of color categorization (Vietnamese vs English). • Cognitive Science/Computer Science • Artificial intelligence, architectures of mind, the role of emotion in virtual agents and robots. • Human-computer interaction.

  5. Play With Your Foodby Saxton Freymann & Joost Elffers

  6. My Work at IBM • Joshua Blue – a computer simulation of mind, guided by motivation and emotion. • “Everywhere displays” that project computer images onto objects in the world. • The Glass Engine -- for searching a music catalog based on subjective qualities of the pieces.

  7. More Applied Work at IBM • Museum kiosks that teach people how to look at art by comparing artists’ styles. • Computer generation and recognition of affect in a person’s speech – to make speech sound more natural. • Peer-tutor (with Roz Picard at MIT) – recognition of user frustration using a camera mounted on top of the computer.

  8. MIT Learning Companion Pupil Detection Using the IBM BlueEyes Camera Kapoor, Mota & Picard (2001). Towards a Learning Companion that Recognizes Affect, AAAI Fall Symposium 2001, North Falmouth, MA

  9. Tim Bickmore has developed a virtual agent that acts as an exercise coach to encourage physical training. Here he is shown talking with Rea, a virtual real estate agent. Relational Agents

  10. Sensing Driver Affect Detecting Driver Stress – MIT Media Lab Healey & Picard (2000). Smart Car: Detecting Driver Stress. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Pattern Recognition, Barcelona, Spain.

  11. Kismet Cynthia Breazeal (MIT) and her sociable robot – affect motivates and guides social learning. Breazeal, C. (2002). Designing Sociable Machines, MIT Press

  12. CMU’s OZ Project (Bates/Reilly) Otto & Iris are animated characters that express their own feelings in interactive games Zoesis Studios, http://www.ottoandiris.com/

  13. Robot Improv “Two robots perform a short play based on an elementary acting exercise…The actors decide on their next action and line of dialog based on their current goals and emotional state and the other actor's last actions. There is no pre-determined script, only sets of available actions and dialog for the actors to choose from. Each play is improvised at run-time.” Bruce, Knight & Nourbakhsh. Robot Improv: Using Drama to Create Believable Agents. The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University

  14. Navigating Environments Rodrigo Ventura and colleagues have created soccer-playing robots that learn to respond to environmental cues Sadio, Tavares, Ventura & Custodio (2001). An emotion-based agent architecture application with real robots. AAAI Fall Symposium, N. Falmouth, MA.

  15. Other Projects • Social interactions in chat rooms: • Placement of a dot representing each participant in a discussion shows who is central. • Privacy and trust on the web: • What encourages people to use the internet to make purchases, how safe do they perceive it? • Biometrics – how can computers be used to identify people in crowds or entry points, for security purposes?

  16. Training Needed • M.S. in Experimental or Engineering Psychology. • Accessibility and usability studies • Market research • Ph.D. in Cognitive, Social or Experimental Psychology. • Research on human-computer interaction • Design of products

  17. Careers in Industry • IBM Research hires a lot of Ph.D.-level psychologists in its think tank (so do Xerox, Microsoft, Oracle, Disney, etc.) • Masters-level psychology jobs are abundant in usability and accessibility testing. • Find them through the trade conferences.

  18. Careers in Academia • People move freely between academia and private industry and many projects are done using teams located in both places. • Research and teaching jobs at universities require a Ph.D. • Academia is more stable than industry and offers more freedom of choice of projects and interested students to help.

  19. Good Grad Schools • Local Ph.D. level: • UC Irvine, UCSD, UCLA • National Ph.D. level: • MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Georgia Tech, Cornell • University of Michigan, UNC Chapel Hill, NYU • M.S. Level: • University of Memphis • New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

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