Brain, Behavior, and the Emergence of Cognitive Competence

A program-project grant supported by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (HD-38051)

Research Updates:

RESEARCH UPDATE - APRIL 2001

From April 12 to April 14, 2001, many of the investigators involved in the B2EC2 program-project were in New Orleans for the ninety-third annual meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SSPP). SSPP is an organization that promotes philosophy and psychology in the southern section of the United States. For more information about SSPP, click here.

This meeting was a good opportunity for each of these researchers to present some of their recent data and also discuss future research with colleagues. Papers from B2EC2 researchers covered a diverse range of topics in cognitive psychology including attention, memory, planning, uncertainty monitoring, metacognition, and a report on cognitive skills of monkeys under hypergravity.

David Washburn presented a paper titled "Executive Versus Experiential Constraints on Attention" and was a co-author on numerous other papers.

David Smith co-authored a paper with John Paul Minda and David Washburn entitled "A Possible Discontiguity in Categorization Between Humans and Non-human Primates: The Case of the Shepard, Hoveland, and Jenkins Tasks" and presented a second, sole-authored paper "Toward a Comparative Psychology of Uncertainty Monitoring and Metacognition."

Wendy Shields presented a paper entitled "Can Rhesus Monkeys Make Prospective Judgments of Knowing?" Additionally, she was the co-author on a paper presented by Katarina Guttmannova entitled "Uncertain Responses by Five-year-olds in a Memory Monitoring Task."

Charles Menzel presented a paper entitled "Concerning Recall Memory in a Symbol-using Chimpanzee."

Tom Putney presented a paper entitled "Intention and the Concept of Plan: A Historical Review" and also chaired the session Systems of Psychology.

Dalila Bovet co-authored a paper with David Washburn entitled "Hypergravity Effects on PTS Performance of Rhesus Monkeys."

Michael Beran co-authored a paper with James Pate, David Washburn, and Duane Rumbaugh entitled "Sequential Responding and Planning in Chimpanzees and Rhesus Monkeys."

James Pate was co-author on a paper presented by Leigh Rankin entitled "The Relation of the SSPP to Other Scholarly Organizations" and also chaired the Key Barkley Symposium on the History of Psychology.