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Why grad school is hard

My cohort of PhD students at the UC San Diego Cognitive Science department started with nine members and only two of us finished. This isn't an indictment of the department or those who left or moved. The department is great and so was my cohort. It's because grad school is hard. Most students figure it's hard, but going in ... (more)



Amsel, B., Urbach, T.P., Kutas, M. Alive and grasping: Stable and rapid semantic access to an object category but not object graspability, NeuroImage, 2013, Vol. 77, pp. 1-13
How quickly do different kinds of conceptual knowledge become available following visual word perception? Resolving this question will inform neural and computational theories of visual word recognition and seman- tic memory use. We measured real-time brain activity using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during a go/nogo task to determine the upper limit by which category-related knowledge (living/nonliving) and action-related knowledge (graspable/ungraspable) must have been accessed to influence a downstream deci- sion process. We find that decision processes can be influenced by the living/nonliving distinction by 160 ms after stimulus onset whereas information about (one-hand) graspability is not available before 300 ms. We also provide evidence that rapid access to category-related knowledge occurs for all items, not just a subset of living, nonliving, graspable, or ungraspable ones, and for all participants regardless of their response speed. The latency ofthe N200 nogo effect by contrast is sensitive to decision speed. We propose a tentative hypothesis of the neural mechanisms underlying semantic access and a subsequent decision process.


Research Opportunities (199s)
  • Language Development and Remediation in Children
    We are evaluating two interventions for dyslexia that involve training the temporal dynamics of the visual system (magnocellular pathway) and the auditory system, and whether the two interventions together have super-additive effects. As a Research Assistant, you would be traveling to one or two of five participating local elementary schools ...
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  • Brain Activity Underlying Access to Sensory and World Knowledge During Sentence Comprehension
    We study how the human brain processes language, including at the single word level and sentence level. Our primary methodology in this pursuit is to record event-related potentials (ERP) from the scalp. These brain potentials can provide a real-time window into the neural processes underlying language comprehension. One of our ...
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Recent News & Links (see all)


Summer Internships working on KA Lite at UCSD

Join us in the offline learning revolution, and help to bridge the digital divide!

The Foundation for Learning Equality (FLE) is a non-profit organization dedicated to creating tools for sharing and authoring open-licensed educational content for use by anyone around the world, with a focus on reaching those with limited or no internet access. We're looking for software development  interns to volunteer with us this summer to help expand the KA Lite project, a lightweight web app for serving core Khan Academy content (videos and exercises) without needing internet connectivity, from a local server (even a Raspberry Pi!). The internship will take place around the UCSD campus, but can also be done remotely (we have developers around the world). Please read the application overview for more information, and feel free to email us at info@learningequality.org if you have any questions.


Looking for students for the Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize

Are you looking for project experience? Are you interested in revolutionizing medical technology?


Art of Science Learning Incubator for Innovation

The Balboa Park Cultural Partnership invites you to participate in the NSF-funded Art of Science Learning Incubator for Innovation. The Art of Science Learning project uses the arts to spark creativity in science learning and to develop a skilled workforce in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics).


New article by Prof. Rafael Nunez and Dr. K Cooperider

Prof. R. 

Núñez's & Dr. K. Cooperrider's article 'The tangle of space and time in human cognition' is on the cover of the current (May) issue of /Trends in Cognitive Science/. http://www.cell.com/trends/cognitive-sciences/issue?pii=S1364-6613(13)X0005-1


Campus-wide Events (see all)

Evan Raiewski (PhD defense)

Aging and Longevity after Photoperiod Induced Variations in Life History

In many organisms, sexual maturity occurs at an age proportional to one third of their maximal lifespan. This relationship has been shown to be at least partially genetically determined, as fruit flies specifically selected for delayed sexual maturity are accompanied by an increase in lifespan (Luckinbill & Clare, 1985). However, it was previously unknown whether delaying sexual matruity via environmnetal manipulations would increase longevity compared to genetically similar animals ...
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Fri, Jun 21st, 1:30pm-2:30pm (The Crick Conference Room: Room 3545, Mandler Hall)
(2 days, 4 hours from now)