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Research

More than a dozen active laboratories in the department focus on topics such as the physiology of taste and preference formation, children's acquisition of spatial knowledge, transactive knowledge in organizations, implicit learning in cognitive disorders, visual functions in Down syndrome, creativity and cognition in the arts, cognition without a spine (i.e., in octopus), hippocampal atrophy in early Alzheimer's disease, implicit impression formation, Darwinian models of mate selection, biomemetic robotics, neurodegeneration in the aged and implicit social cognition.

All labs are well equipped, and many have attracted funding from NSF, NIH, NASA, DARPA, and other organizations. Several faculty members have appointments and working collaborations with research labs in city hospitals and medical schools with access to frontier technologies such as fMRI.

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Undergraduate students who are currently taking the Introduction to Psychology course may sign up for research participation.

Faculty Research Areas

Comparative/Animal/Bio/Neuroscience

• computational neuroscience; behavioral neuroscience; integration of neural populations in cognitive function; neural networks; basic behavioral sciences
• animal behavior; pavlovian mechanisms; biomimetic and cognitive robotics
• biopsychology of appetite; food preferences, obesity in humans and laboratory animals; physiology of feeding

Applied/Clinical/Neuroscience

• clinical neuropsychology;cognitive neuroscience; neurohormones; human behavior genetics
• abnormal psychology; neurodevelopment of psychopathology, cognitive/neuropsychological functioning, and early risk factors in the development of psychopathology
• cognitive changes associated with early stages of dementia; psychological dysfunction in neuro-degenerative disease; cognitive remediation
• biological basis of antisocial behavior

Cognitive

• associative learning; learning in food preferences; cognitive foundations of complex learning; implicit learning; knowledge acquisition in communication; extinction
• cognitive development; language development
• thinking; language; memory; hypermnesia; metacognition
• motivation; cognitive and motivational interactions; psychodynamic aspects of cognition, subliminal processes, defense mechanisms
• cognitive studies of creativity, expertise in visual arts
• social cognition
• neural mechanisms of associative memory
• memory and attention in skilled performance

Basic Sensory Processes

• sensory systems, psychophysics
• vision, color vision; marine chemical senses and olfaction; visual psychophysiology
• sensory/perceptual development in infants; aging and vision, life-span changes
• spatial-temporal contrast sensitivity; stereopsis

Personality/Social-organizational

• social psychology; social cognition, social identification, self-concept, prejudice and stereotyping; attitudinal ambivalence; sex differences; social interaction;
  communication; groups research, transactive knowledge systems
• industrial and organizational psychology, organizational psychology
• evolutionary psychology; mate selection; human mating
• personality; interpretation of dreams and jokes

Testing/Methods/Measurement/Philosophy of Science

• ecological validity of neuropsychological instruments
• psychological testing
• eye movements
• epistemology
• philosophical psychology
• lexicography

Faculty Research Specializations

Microcolonies of Neisseria elongata (left) and Neisseria gonorrhoeae (right) interacting on　human epithelium.

Israel Abramov

Visual psychophysics, color vision, spatial vision, visual neuroscience

We study vision – all aspects of vision, in any accessible creature. We have used techniques ranging from anatomy, to electrophysiology, to behavioral methods. We have studied topics from recording responses of single neurons to spectral lights, to impact of environmental light on aesthetics of museum-going, to sex-linked differences in basic visual functions, to categorization of objects seen under degraded viewing conditions. Always, our approach is ultimately based on the biology of the visual system. These studies derive from a program we undertook some three decades ago: creation of a battery of tests to measure many aspects of vision: spatial and temporal resolution, and acuity; color vision, from discrimination to magnitude estimation of color appearance; binocular vision, stereopsis, and stereo-acuity; motion detection; pigmentation of iris and skin. At present we are concentrating on behavioral (a.k.a. psychophysical) studies of sex-linked variations in vision, and detectability of objects when viewing is less than optimal.

Website:　http://userhome.brooklyn.cuny.edu/iabramov