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Image courtesy of APOD.

Research Interests

My research interests are centered on how the human cognitive system allows us to adapt to ever changing psychological and physical environments. Although change is constant, it is often cyclical and results in patterns of regularity that emerge over several time scales. For example, the cognitive system flexibly integrates representations that capture the more broad scale, stable elements of a language (e.g., grammar) with representations of the more variable day-to-day usage and lexical innovations. Humans face the constant challenge of discovering what regularities are relevant to a specific context of behavior, identifying anomalies and exceptions to those regularities, and using this knowledge to take successful action in the world. Although such learning often benefits from explicit instruction from others, it also often happens incidentally in the course of a certain activity and without the intent to do so.

My research approach is to integrate basic cognitive and neuroscience research into a conceptual model which suggests that cognitive representations of relevant regularities arise from actively engaging with stimuli for a particular purpose. My current focus concerns the question of how our cognitive system strikes a balance between representing the more stable and the more uncertain aspects of life. I have several lines of research to address this issue. One line of research explores how the environment shapes learning and behavior. Another asks whether perceptual abilities constrain and/or enhance learning. Finally, I have a line of research that examines the cognitive processes that bind the elements of an event into a representation that can be stored in memory and later recognized as reliable.

Regularity in the environment. It has been proposed that the visual system relies on direct perception of the environment instead of internalizing a representation of it. This is especially sensible in the visual modality because of the relative ease with which one can access information by moving the eyes. Because of this ease of information access, it had further been proposed that eye movement behavior is not sensitive to statistical properties of the environment. That is, the process of visual search does not benefit from or utilize evidence that a search target is more likely to appear in one of two general locations. Using eye-tracking, I have shown the opposite (Jones & Kaschak, in press). Participants adapted very quickly to a target location bias by initiating search to the side of the display that was more likely to contain the target, and continued to show increased adaptation over the course of the experiments. Critically, this behavior operated independently of the actual target location on a given trial. The important implication is that the sparing use of cognitive resources is modulated to exploit statistical properties of the environment. In subsequent research I have discovered that eye movement behavior is sensitive to likely target location even when the target is distinctively marked, which indicates an interaction between a source of information originating through the sense and one from memory (Jones, Kaschak, & Boot, in preparation). I am currently collecting data to further explore this interaction with the attention capture paradigm. The future of this line of research has the potential to go in multiple directions. As one example, I am heading a collaboration to investigate the dynamics of visual search in complex environments with the goal of understanding how different behavioral strategies are implanted under different conditions. As another example, insights into how different sources of information are managed may also provide clues about development across the lifespan and in different populations (.e.g., autistic children).

Perceptual abilities. I am also exploring the contribution of basic perceptual processes, like apparent motion, to implicit learning of patterned sequences of stimulus locations. I have recently discovered that the perception of apparent motion of the stimulus moving from location to location contributes to and enhances learning of the sequence (Jones & Kaschak, in preparation). Because the perception of motion requires simultaneous representation of an object’s previous and current location, the two representations become integrated and the activation of the first one increases the probability of the activation of the subsequent one. Future work will be devoted to generalizing to other modes of representation integration that may arise from conceptual processing, such as perceived animacy of the stimulus. The paradigm also shows promise for research about the flexibility of representations in adaptation to progressive but systematic change in the sequence.

Binding cognitive representations. The thesis of my dissertation is that learning of serially presented visual sequences is constrained to regularities whose component elements are actively and integratively processed and specific to the features required to accomplish a given task. The results obtained so far are encouraging and preliminary analyses indicate initial support for my hypothesis. Actively maintaining dependent elements simultaneously does appear to be a prerequisite to learning. Further experiments are designed to determine if a cognitive process, such as comparison, is required or enhances learning by increasing the longevity of the representations over those created by simple maintenance. Two experiments are planned to test the hypothesis that aspects of the dependent elements critical to the task must be the information carrying feature. I plan on future work that explores the generality of the findings to different spatial and temporal configurations of both auditory stimuli in an effort to specify biases that exist in the different modalities for different configurations and to determine the extent to which such biases are a result of learning beyond biological disposition.

Broader Interests. I am also interested in various aspects of language such as acquisition, the underlying representations of semantics, and the dynamics of conversation. Early in my graduate training I studied the effect of adding visual referents to an auditorily presented artificial grammar that contained a rule-violating idiomatic construction (Jones & Kaschak, 2009). In previous research, the variability introduced by the idiomatic structure served to highlight the rules of the grammar. Adding the visual stimuli disrupted this benefit, suggesting that the contribution of idiomatic constructions to grammar learning is altered once semantics are introduced out of context. I have plans additional studies to provide such a context. I have also explored the role of implicit learning ability as an individual difference moderating one’s sensitivity to changes in the frequency of one of two English language sentence constructions (Kaschak, Kutta, & Jones, in press). In this study there was only weak relation between implicit learning ability and change in the low frequency construction. The properties of the implicit learning task seemed to tap a different mode of learning that only partially overlapped with language production. Both of these studies highlight the specificity of the cognitive representations underlying each task, which, in turn, suggests a functional dynamic model of cognition that organizes around the current state of the environment to achieve a certain outcome.

I look forward to integrating my research with others in collaborations focused on a variety of topics. For one, research on the early development of perceptual, conceptual, and language skills would benefit from theoretical models that emphasize representational specificity in an effort to elucidate what perceptual and conceptual dispositions exist to learning some information more readily than others. As another example, establishing social and business relationships of all kinds entails learning patterns of behavior which, in turn, leads to expectations about others. I am interested in how these networks of expectations shape behavior, especially the consequences of and difficulties encountered when an individual changes or wants to change. I am also interested in contributing to computational modeling efforts directed at both answering theoretical questions and in developing artificial intelligence.

My research interests are broadly centered on how people perceive, represent, store, and utilize information in an undulating world. Grappling with, and providing some answers to how this is achieved has the potential to make contact with virtually every aspect of our personal and social lives. It is an ambitious program, but rich with potential to make an impact on our theoretical understanding of ourselves and to address the practical issues of life.