Last week, the lab hit the slopes in upstate New York. Read on for the full trip report!

Each summer a select number of undergraduate research assistants join the lab to learn, first-hand, about our research. Last summer Sachith Cheruvatur joined us from NYU Abu Dhabi as part of the NYU Global Network University initiative. Sachith is a sophomore philosophy major at NYUAD but also has an interest in computational cognitive science. During his time in the lab, Sachith helped to develop a new class for psychology majors at NYU on the relationship between robotics, neuroscience, and the human mind which is being taught currently. Sachith was kind enough to share a few thoughts about his experience. Hopefully this will interest other students wanting to learning more about the lab and what we do.

Well, it has been an interesting week. The lab has mostly been offline for a week following a major power outage in lower Manhattan caused by Hurricane Sandy. Luckily, most of us were only modestly inconvenienced (no power or Internet for a few days forced some of us to resort to reading... gasp... books!). However, in the interest of documenting the history of the lab, we collected up a a couple photos of our experience of the storm.

Advances in Cognitive Science frequently come when open questions in the science of the human mind map on to new innovations in the machine learning or artificial intelligence communities. A new article in Perspectives in Psychological Science suggests that one such area of confluence may be the study of active or self-directed learning. Read on to learn how recent advances in machine learning research could alter our understanding of self-directed learning in humans.

On Monday, August 20th, 2012 the lab hosted joint a technical workshop with Yael Niv‘s group at Princeton covering how to run experiments on Mechnical Turk and how to do multi-voxel pattern analysis (MVPA) on fMRI data. It was a kind of a random collection of tutorial topics, but the two half-day sessions were both fun and informative. The goal of the workshop was to share notes and give people to basic technical skills they need to use these techniques in their research. We've collected up the slides and a few helpful notes.