This year, Madlab is getting the spotlight at the 33rd annual Cognitive Science Conference! Current lab members Brent Miller, James Pooley, Sean Tauber, and Shunan Zhang will all be presenting talks on their recent research projects, and Tim Rubin will present his research findings with a poster.

Brent will be discussing how cognitive models can accurately measure expertise on rank ordering tasks. In addition, he will also be presenting research on the result of iterative learning in the Wisdom of Crowds. James’ research aims to use cognitive models to assess memory performance in Alzheimer’s patients. Sean will be talking about how people can infer the goals and intentions of others by using certain cues, such as spatial orientation and the presence or absence of visual obstructions. And finally, Shunan’s research involves applying a new machine learning method, Space Instance Representation, to the problem of category identification.

Madlab alumni Matt Zeigenfuse will also be presenting a talk on categorization and similarity judgment, research mostly drawn from his dissertation. Where would science be without us? The conference will be held in Boston, Massachusetts in July 2011.