Ohio University Home Clinics and Laboratories

Cognitive Laboratory

Dr. Francis S. Bellezza
Dr. Claudia González-Vallejo
Dr. Ronaldo Vigo

Cognitive Laboratory - Welcome

Welcome to the homepage of the cognitive psychology department at Ohio University! Our department consists of several labs studying a wide range of cognitive phenomena, including memory, judgment and decision-making, and concept formation. Specifically, our research questions range from the roles of conscious and unconscious processes in source-monitoring to the extent to which eye movements reflect the complexity of categorization.

Please select a link below to learn more about our individual labs.

Faculty and research interests
Graduate students
Research Facilities

Back to Top

Faculty and research interests:

Francis Bellezza.

  • Multinomial modeling
    • Dr. Bellezza's main area of research involves applying general-processing-tree (multinomial) models to explaining the functioning of human memory. These mathematical techniques allow research to analyze complex behavior into basic cognitive mechanisms retrieval of information from memory and decision-making. Remembering is a mix of storing information, retrieving incomplete information from memory, and making decisions and judgments based on typically incomplete information.
      • Bellezza, Francis S. “Evaluation of six multinomial models of conscious and unconscious processes with the recall-recognition paradigm.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, v. 29 issue 5, 2003, p. 779-796.

 

 

Claudia Gonzalez-Vallejo

  • Proportional difference model
    • My research focuses on understanding how people make decisions as well as on the factors that affect people's judgments. I am primarily interested in choice behavior (preferences). My work on choice behavior uses a stochastic model that I developed to investigate how individuals make trade-offs among characteristics of the options to be selected. For example, many products may be described in terms of their quality and their price. Because typically higher quality also implies higher price, the decision will not be an easy one. How do individuals resolve the conflict inherit in choosing? What affects the consistency of decision-making? How do people perceive changes in attribute values as a function of the context? How does persuasion affect the evaluation of objects to determine a final choice? Some of the basic notions in this research program are also applied to consumer and medical decision-making situations. Current research is also exploring the interaction between people's affective reactions to choice options and their cognitive evaluations of them.
      • Scheibehenne, B., Rieskamp, J. & González-Vallejo, C. (In press). Cognitive Models of Preferential Choice: Comparing Decision Field Theory with the Stochastic Difference Model. Cognitive Science.
      • Reid, A. & González-Vallejo, C. (2008). Emotion as a tradeable quantity. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 21, 1-29.
      • González-Vallejo, C. & Reid, A. A. (2006) Quantifying persuasion effects on choice behavior with the decision threshold of the stochastic choice model. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 100, 250-267.
  • Unconscious thought / Online impression formation
    • The role of unconscious processes in higher-order judgment and decision making processes is both an exciting and controversial area in the JDM field.  Our research aims to find parsimonious explanations for psychological phenomena that have been used by other researchers as evidence for the superiority of unconscious to conscious processing in complex judgments and decisions.
      • González-Vallejo, C., Lassiter G.D., Bellezza, F.S., &Lindberg, M. (2008). “Save Angels Perhaps”: A Critical Examination of Unconscious Thought Theory and the Deliberation Without Attention Effect. Review of General Psychology, 12, 282-296.

 

 

Ronaldo Vigo.

  • The purpose of Ohio University’s SCOPE Labis to conduct empirical and theoretical research on the nature of categorization, concept learning, perception, and inference in humans. A key aspect of our research involves modeling empirical results structurally. Structural models characterize behavior in terms of the structural properties of the stimulus: namely, continuity, invariance, well-formedness, cardinality, and complexity, among others. Often, the mathematical methods and theories necessary to construct the most effective and parsimonious structural models are not known. Thus, we are also committed to the development of mathematical modeling frameworks that better capture the particular structure in question. To this effect, we have proposed a variety of formal frameworks for modeling Boolean concept learning. These have been based on complexity and invariance principles (Vigo, 2006, 2008, 2009c).
    • Vigo, R. (2006a). A Note on the Complexity of Boolean Concepts. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 50, 501-510.
    • Vigo, R. (2009c). Categorical Invariance and Structural Complexity in Human Concept Learning. Journal of Mathematical Psychology, doi:10.1016/j.jmp.2009.04.009.  
    • Vigo, R., Allen, C., (2009a). How to reason without words: inference as categorization. Cognitive Processing 10(1): 51-88.
    • Vigo, R. (2009b). Modal Similarity. Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, doi: 10.1080/09528130802113422.
    • Vigo, R. (2009d), A Dialogue on Concepts, Think, (in press).
    • Vigo, R., Allen. C., (2009). Form Over Mind: How Structure Determines Cognition. Trends in Cognitive Science, (under review).
    • Vigo, R. (2009). Two Ways of Measuring the Complexity of Boolean Sets.
      Complexity Journal, (under review).
    • Vigo, R. (2009). Mathematical Principles of Human Concept Learning. [Principia Mathematica Informatium Hominis]. CSLI Publications, (in preparation)

 

Back to Top

Graduate Students:

Jason Harman
Nathaniel “Tanny” Phillips
Janna Chimeli
Sunil Carspecken
Ru Zhang
Figen Ozmen

Back to Top

Research Facilities

The cognitive department was granted two brand new lab spaces in the Porter Hall addition which was opened in the Fall of 2008!

One our new lab spaces houses the SCOPE lab which is headed by Dr. Vigo. This lab contains state of the art eye tracking equipment for use in studies on perception and cognitive complexity.

The other lab space is used by Dr. Gonzalez-Vallejo for collaborative research and discussion.

Back to Top

Updated:   July 13, 2009