The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series presents a lecture sponsored by the Department of Psychology and Campus Auxiliary Services:
Memory and Foraging and Foraging as Memory
Dr. Theo Rhodes
Theo Rhodes
State University of New York, Oswego
Thursday, April 21, 2022, 5:00 pm
Science Hall 181
SUNY New Paltz
Performance in a free recall memory task (e.g., name as many animals as you can) is characterized by bursts and clusters of recalls interspersed with longer pauses. Animal foraging behavior (e.g., squirrels looking for nuts) is also characterized by bursts of short movements interspersed with longer paths. The similarity between these behaviors goes beyond analogy, and the shared statistical properties of the behaviors suggest a common underlying cause. I will present results from human memory tasks as well as human foraging tasks, showing how each improves our understanding of the other and how they may inform our understanding of cognition more broadly.
Theo Rhodes is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at SUNY Oswego. He received his PhD in Psychology from University of Connecticut. Theo Rhodes’ primary research interest is the understanding of human behavior as a complex system, specifically the application and adaptation of approaches and methods from other fields to the unique problems characterizing living systems. The current focus is an exploration of the hypothesis that many cognitive processes are at root search processes. This includes experiments on foraging in memory as well as virtual and real spaces, with concurrent development of analyses for the identification of the underlying dynamics.
