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Teaching Specializations
Teaching Interests My teaching interests derive largely, though not entirely, from my research interests. My teaching interests are somewhat broader as I understand and accept that students have very diverse interests and orientations. This is true even among highly dedicated and bright students, and these individual differences should be accommodated. For example, less introspective students tend to be more interested in the practical, applied aspects of the research rather than the philosophical implications that fascinate me most; I emphasize both the philosophical and applied realms. I have taught various courses in cognitive psychology and perception, with occasional specialized seminars focusing on aspects of working memory and sometimes on developmental processes. In this teaching, certain main themes and techniques have emerged as especially important to me. The most important technique for me is the classroom demonstration. In perception class, I like to arrange demonstrations that are striking, make people think, and can be replicated without high-tech equipment (so students can show friends and relatives). For example, for my undergraduate perception course, I always request a classroom with no windows and, in one class, have the students patch one eye shut long enough to become fully dark-adapted. Then I turn the lights out. Students are amazed that the dark-adapted eye can see so well in the dark while the other eye is functionally blind. A main theme for my teaching is the fallibility of human information processing. I follow that theme through from the limited temporal and spatial resolving power of the senses to perceptual illusions and ambiguities, limitations in working memory and attention, inattentional blindness, false memories, limitations in the ability to process language such as garden-path sentences, heuristics of reasoning and decision-making, faulty metacognition, and non-veridical aspects of social cognition. For me, that point of human fallibility not only is critical for a philosophical understanding of the mind; it also has critically important practical implications. When enough people in the world understand that their own viewpoints are susceptible to error and overconfidence, they will be better able to listen to one another and compromise. It is that point, even more than clinical uses of my research, that most easily allows me to justify to myself why society should support me while I have so much fun examining abstract properties of the human mind. In graduate mentoring, my policy is to look for synergy between a student and myself. I want students to be successful in their careers and therefore I look for graduate students sharing some of my core interests; but I make no attempt to produce replicas of myself, nor have I done so. I believe that keeping in mind the goals and personalities of individual graduate students, and interacting with each one accordingly, is quite helpful for their progress. It is especially the balance between supervision and independence that is critical and must change notably as the student advances through graduate school. Former Doctoral Students and Their Current Positions
Former Postdoctoral Fellows and Their Current Positions
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[ Research ] [ Working-Memory
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revised: January 2009 Copyright © The Curators of the University of Missouri
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