Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences

Meet Michele Rucci, a new professor in the University's brain and cognitive sciences department, and his robot “Mr. T.” Rucci and his robot are using eye-tracking tools and virtual reality to replicate the small eye movements experienced by humans.

Rochester researchers are using virtual reality-based brain training to better understand the brain's plasticity in athletes who have experienced concussions and older adults with mild cognitive impairments. The goal? Improved therapeutic treatments patients can do at home.

Monkeys had higher confidence in their ability to remember an image when the visual contrast was high. These kinds of metacognitive illusions—false beliefs about how we learn or remember best—are shared by humans, leading brain and cognitive scientists to believe that metacognition could have an evolutionary basis.

Brain research does not take a summer vacation, and neither does Magdalena Granados ’19. The McNair Scholar is working on “awake language mapping" research designed to help neurosurgeons operate with greater precision.

Tanenhaus is best known for developing the Visual World Paradigm, which uses eye movements to study the mechanisms behind speech and language comprehension.

Steven Piantadosi, an assistant professor of brain and cognitive sciences, was recognized as one of this year's outstanding psychological scientists in the early stages of their post-PhD research career.

Machine learning provides computers with the ability to learn from labeled examples and observations of data. Researchers at Rochester are developing computer programs incorporating machine learning to teach robots and software to understand natural language and body language, make predictions from social media, and model human cognition.

University researchers show that primates -- like humans -- have the ability to distinguish between large and small quantities of objects, irrespective of the surface area those objects occupy.

A new study by vision scientists finds that children with poor vision see vast and lasting improvement in their peripheral vision after only eight hours of playing kid-friendly video games.

What does the meaning of a word look like? Researchers have, for the first time, decoded and predicted the brain activity patterns of word meanings within sentences, and successfully predicted what the brain patterns would be for new sentences.