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Marietta College Psychology professor presents research at Midwestern Cognitive Science Conference

by Tom Perry

Marietta, Ohio (05/17/2023) — Dr. Charles Doan, William Van Law Plankey Assistant Professor of Psychology at Marietta College, recently presented research at the ninth annual Midwestern Cognitive Science Conference at Grand Valley State University.

The research was conducted at Marietta College with undergraduate students and involved the recently acquired eye-tracking technology within the Department of Psychology. In particular, Doan reported on new advancements in understanding information processing and factors that affect human learning in the absence of environmental feedback.

The title of the work was "Using Generalized Invariance Structure Theory to account for sequence effects in unsupervised learning of exclusive-or relations."

"The work connects such processing and learning to important eye-tracking metrics, such as relative dwell time to information in our environment and how we fixate/attend to different information in our environment as we learn," Doan said.

Additionally, Doan reported on developments for work conducted in collaboration with researchers at Ohio University that directly connects conceptual cognitive processes with decisional cognitive processes in humans. The title of the work was "Revisiting Hick's Law: Integrating choice behavior and concept learnability."

"Importantly, this work highlighted the shortcomings of applying traditional information theory to understanding the intersection of these cognitive capacities, while demonstrating how a theory grounded in relational information and invariance-based conceptual processing overcomes the aforementioned shortcomings," he said.

Located in Marietta, Ohio, at the confluence of the Muskingum and Ohio rivers, Marietta College is a four-year liberal arts college. Tracing its roots to the Muskingum Academy back in 1797, the College was officially chartered in 1835. Today Marietta College serves a body of 1,200 full-time students. The College offers more than 50 majors and is consistently ranked as one of the top regional comprehensive colleges by U.S. News & World Report and The Princeton Review. Marietta was selected seventh in the nation according to the Brookings Institution's rankings of colleges by their highest value added, regardless of major.

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