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2011 Robert J. Glushko Prize Winners Eric Mandelbaum, Michael Frank, and Edward Vul

July 22, 2011
30 minutes
Eric Mandelbaum, Michael Frank, Edward Vul
 

 

Eric Mandelbaum is a Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at Yale University. His interests include the philosophy of cognitive science, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of psychology, and the philosophy of science. His most recent work examined issues in moral psychology (particularly focusing on people's paradoxical responsibility judgments), the nature of beliefs (and 'aliefs'), and belief fixation.

Michael Frank is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. His primary research interest is in language acquisition and includes: computational models of language acquisition, especially word segmentation and word learning, the role of social cognition in language development and the reciprocal effects of language on cognition, including cross-cultural studies of numerical cognition.

Edward Vul is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of California, San Diego. He works at the intersection of the computational and algorithmic descriptions of human cognition, to reconcile models of cognition as statistically optimal computations with the resource limitations that cognitive psychology has documented. Specifically, he focuses on two questions: How can we approximate optimal statistical computations despite our limited cognitive resources? And, do we use our limited resources optimally? Vul is perhaps best well known recently for a controversial paper (with Hal Pashler)originally entitled Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience, which questioned whether some of the conclusions of fMRI brainscans relating to human behavior might have been overstated.