News

2018

February
- Matt Cook offers another free R/RStudio workshop to the department
January
- Welcome to Matt Slusky and Anna Polyvyanna who joined the lab as research assistants

2018

November
- Randy gives an invited talk on the instance theory of semantics at the satellite meeting of the Society for Mathematical Psychology
October
- Welcome to Professor John Vokey who will visit the lab this month to work on problems related to learning and structure
September
- Welcome to Lisa Tarnowski and Chelsea Matsumoto who will both pursue their Honours degree in the lab this year
August
- Not from our lab, but check out the materials from the Open Science Workshop held at CSBBCS 2018 in Newfoundland: https://osf.io/ghz48/
July
- Congratulations to Matt for successfully defending his MA thesis titled "The mathematics of clinical diagnosis: Cognitively-inspired computational psychiatry"
- Matt will be featured on a Winnipeg airport pillar
June
- New paper published on an instance model of semantics in the journal Computational Brain and Behaviour
- Matt wins the Peter Graf Award for best poster from the Brain and Cognitive Science section of the Canadian Psychological Association for the work on his language classification system
- Matt is featured in UMToday again for his work developing a semantic classification technique for identifying mental health from free-form written essays
April
- Congratulations to Brad for winning an NSERC Masters scholarship
- Congratulations to Matt for winning an NSERC Doctoral scholarship
- Paper accepted to the Cognitive Science Society meeting this year in Madison, Wisconsin
March
- Matt makes it into the finals for the three minute thesis competition (link)
- Randy presents the cognitive search engine at the 2018 Philadelphia meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association

2017

December
- Our course, Thinking (PSYC3390), was named a UM Cool Course in the 2016 MacLean's rankings
November
- A paper accepted for publication at Animal Cognition with John Vokey, Jason Tangen, Rachel Searston, and Scott Allen. The paper re-presents a visual familiarity account of evidence for orthographic processing in baboons in relation to new work with pigeons.
- Congratulations to Matt for winning the John Castellan Award for Best Student Paper based on his work on language classification and computational psychiatry at this year's meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology
- Congratulations to Brad for presenting two posters at the Society for Computers in Psychology meeting. One poster documented type 1 error inflation associated with use of a median-split statistical analysis. The other presented a robot that he built that learns using MINERVA AL as the underlying engine
- Brendan Johns and Randy got a paper accepted for publication at Cognitive Science that uses computational models of language to examine consistency and difference in language use in a large database of novels. The work was presented at the Psychonomic Society meeting as one of the 10 Member Select-Speaker Awards
September
- Welcome to Brad Smith, a new Masters student in the lab, who will be working on the MINERVA AL theory of associative learning
- Robert Collins from McMaster presented work on a computational account of recognition memory that has emerged from our interactions in the the multi-university international student training network
  - Collins, R. N., Milliken, B., Jamieson, R. K. (2017, September). An associative learning model of the spacing effect in recognition. Poster delivered at the European Society of Cognitive Psychology, Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.
August
- Congratulations to Chrissy for being part of a team (lead by Doug Williams) at University of Winnipeg to win the 2017 Best Paper Award for their contribution titled "Intertrial unconditioned stimuli differentially impact trace conditioning" in the journal Learning and Behavior
- Congratulations to Dr. Chrissy M. Chubala for defending her PhD thesis titled "Scaling function learning from individuals to groups"
July
- A paper by Brendan Johns and Randy entitled “A Large Scale Analysis of Individual Variability in Written Language” has been selected for a 2017 Psychonomic Society Select-Speaker Award.
- Congratulations to Matt for publishing A Psychologically Inspired Search Engine to appear as a chapter in Lecture Notes in Computer Science: High Performance Computing Systems and Applications
June
- June was a busy month with lab members presenting work at meetings of the
- Congratulations to Matt and Chrissy for publishing a new paper in Behavior Research Methods titled AGSuite: Software to conduct feature analysis of artificial grammar learning performance
May
- Congratulations to Mikayla who will pursue graduate studies in the Computer Science program at University of British Columbia
- Congratulations to Mikayla for winning a Canadian Psychological Association Certificate of Excellence for her Honour's thesis titled Latent Semantic Analysis: A theory of visual knowledge?
April
- Mikayla is featured in UM Today again
- Congratulations to Mitch for winning a University of Manitoba Undergraduate Research Award to study knowledge representation in the lab this summer
March
- Congratulations to Rory for winning the Faculty of Arts Students' Teacher Recognition Reception Award for outstanding course and community work over the course of his undergraduate career
February
- Congratulations to Rory who has accepted an offer to attend business school at University of Alberta
January
- A big congratulations to Dr. Evan T. Curtis for successfully defending his PhD thesis, "Reinterpreting selective impairments in memory: Computational and empirical simulations of dissociations in amnesia"
- Psychology comes to halt as weary researchers say the mind cannot possibly study itself

2016

December 2016: Robert Collins visits from the Milliken laboratory at McMaster University to begin work on a computational analysis of data on memory costs following on attentional processing of a twice presented stimulus
December 2016: Mikayla is featured in the UM Today
November 2016: Matt presents a paper at the Society for Computers in Psychology meeting and Chrissy presents a poster at the Psychonomic Society Meeting
October 2016: Welcome to Mitchell Cunningham who will be involved in collecting data on questions about artificial grammar learning
August 2016: Paper presented at the Cognitive Science Society meeting that details simulations of natural language learning with an exemplar-based model of memory
June 2016: Congratulations to Evan for winning yet another Teaching Assistant Award of Excellence from the Canadian Council of Departments of Psychology
June 2016: Chrissy presents her data on group level function learning at the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science in Ottawa, ON
May 2016: Alexa had an article published in The Conversation about her work on psycho-economic factors underlying asthma and health
April 2016: Congratulations to Michelle who has her 8 lb 6 oz neural network fully up and running
April 2016: Congratulations to Matt for winning an NSERC CGS-M award to pursue a Master's degree in cognitive science
March 2016: Chrissy has a paper accepted on timing and associative learning. The work was conducted with Doug Williams at University of Winnipeg. Congratulations Chrissy
March, 2016: Congratulations to Mikayla who has been selected as one of 24 students to attend the York University Centre for Vision Research visual cognition summer school
February, 2016: Evan has a paper accepted using eye-tracking to measure and assess mental arithmetic. The work was conducted with Jo-anne LeFevre at Carleton University in Ottawa.
February, 2016: Evan has accepted a tenure-track position as Assistant Professor of Psychology at Booth University College. Congratulations Evan!
January, 2016: Another paper (this one empirical) on the production effect accepted at the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology. Congratulations to David Cormack in particular who helped on the project

2015

December, 2015: Paper on a computational account of the production effect accepted at the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology
October, 2015: Congratulations to Chrissy for publishing a paper at Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology on Implicit learning of semantic structure
October 2015: New paper accepted at Psychological Research: Implicit learning is order dependent
August 2015: Randy gives a short talk on memory at the premiere of a Roddenberry produced movie called White Room: 02B3 at the Manitoba Museum Planetarium.
July 2015: Chrissy Chubala and Evan Curtis present some of their recent work at the International Workshop on Learning, Memory, and Attention in Granada Spain.
June, 2015: Congratulations to Evan Curtis for winning the 2015 Teaching Assistant Award of Excellence from the Canadian Council of Departments of Psychology
June, 2015: Congratulations to Rory Waisman for winning a best student presentation award from the Brain and Cognitive Science Section of the Canadian Psychological Association. His poster was titled "A precise computational account of the availability heuristic: MINERVA-DM Revised"
June, 2015: Congratulations to Matt Cook for winning a best undergraduate presentation award from the Social/Personality section of the Canadian Psychological Association for his work with Dr. Katherine Starzyk in the Social Justice Laboratory
April, 2015: Congratulations to Andrew Gabel and Adam Hawkeye for completing their Honours theses. Double congratulations to Andrew who will move onto graduate school at Memorial University in Newfoundland

March, 2015: Congratulations to Matt Cook for winning a University of Manitoba Undergraduate Research Award to work on linear mixed models for item specific analysis of judgements and decisions
March, 2015: New paper accepted at the journal Psychological Research: Information theory and artificial grammar learning: Inferring grammaticality from redundancy

2014

December, 2014: Congratulations to Alexa Yakubovich for winning a 2014 Rhodes scholarship (CBC)
November, 2014: Randy is elected President of the Society for Computers in Psychology
November, 2014: Chrissy Chubala presents work at the annual meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology
October, 2014: Congratulations to all (especially Evan Curtis) on publication of our work on False Recognition of Instruction-set Lures in the journal Memory

September, 2014: Congratulations to Rory Waisman for winning a PURE Undergraduate Research Award to continue his work on false memory
September, 2014: Welcome to Andrew Gabel and Adam Hawkeye, both of whom will complete their honours theses in the lab this year
July, 2014: Evan Curtis, Chrissy Chubala, and Michelle Crease presented work at the Toronto meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science. Evan presented simulations related to amnesia. Chrissy presented a technique for studying distributed cognition. Michelle presented data on the interplay between prospective and retrospective memory.
June, 2014: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for winning top prize at the NENGO summer school run by the Centre for Theoretical Neuroscience at the University of Waterloo. Her project was titled “Mirror Neurons and Affordances”
June, 2014: Randy is elected as Chair Elect of the CPA’s Brain and Cognitive Science Division
June, 2014: We presented data on order effects in implicit learning at the CPA Annual Convention
May, 2014: We presented new data at the APS annual meeting to provide evidence for a strength account of the production effect in recognition memory: Abstract
March, 2014: Congratulations to Rory Waisman for winning an NSERC Undergraduate Student Research Award to work on false memory
March, 2014: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for being named to the Associate Position on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science
February, 2014: Our work on baboon cognition was featured in the APS newsletter This Week in Psychological Science

2013

November, 2013: Chrissy Chubala presented data on retrospective revaluation at the annual meeting of the Psychonomic Society
October, 2013: New paper in Psychological Science: A visual familiarity account of evidence for orthographic processing in baboons (Papio papio)
September, 2013: Congratulations to Jackie Spear for publishing her work on the production effect in the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology
July, 2013: Evan presented data on false recognition at the annual meeting of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science
May, 2013: Congratulations to Alexa Yakubovich for winning the University Gold Medal for highest GPA in the Faculty of Arts
May, 2013: Congratulations to Brian Hauri for graduating his M.A. degree
May, 2013: Congratulations to Evan Curtis for winning a University of Manitoba Graduate Fellowship
May, 2013: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for winning the Canadian Council of Departments of Psychology (CCDP) Awards of Excellence in Teaching Assistance
April, 2013: Congratulations to Alexa Yakubovich for winning the Ten Have Award (Best Honours Thesis in Psychology) and to both Alexa and Thomas Toles for winning CPA Thesis Awards
April, 2013: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for winning NSERC CGS-D doctoral funding
March, 2013: Congratulations to Alexa Yakubovich on her admission to the MSc program in evidence based social intervention at Oxford University
March, 2013: Congratulations to David Cormack on his admission to the graduate program in school psychology at the University of Manitoba

2012

December 2012: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for winning a Duff Roblin Fellowship
November 2012: Congratulations to Thomas Toles for winning a 2013 Rhodes Scholarship
October 2012: Congratulations to Chrissy Chubala for publishing her paper Recoding and representation in artificial grammar learning

Matt's research is featured on a poster at the Winnipeg airport

Matt giving his award winning talk at the 2017 Meeting of the Society for Computers in Psychology: "A computational cognitively-inspired technology for clinical diagnosis"

Cognitive computing group at the 2017 High Performance Computing Symposium in Kingston ON (Clockwise: Blair Armstrong, Geoff Hollis, Chris Westbury Doug Mewhort, Kevin Shabahang, Brendan Johns, Mike Jones, Randy Jamieson; Missing: Matthew Kelly)