Professor Michael Ramscar

Please update your bookmarks : the site has moved here.

Research News & Research in the News

Subscribe to News RSS feed

Popular Press Stories

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: This month, CLL researcher Melody Dye writes on children's surprisingly slow color word development in the latest edition of Scientific American Mind. Why Johnny Can't Name His Colors, draws on research from a recent Cognitive Science article on Feature-Label-Order Effects in learning, and suggests a simple, practical means for speeding children's color word acquisition. Her article is currently one of the most popular articles at Sciam.com, was voted to the top of Reddit Science, and has been top-listed at the Discover blog Not Exactly Rocket Science.

FR LANG NEWS: News about Cognition without Control is now available in French thanks to RIRE, an education think-tank based in Quebec. The article is called L'incapacite des enfants de filtrer les distractions faciliterait l'apprentissage des langues.

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN: In February, CLL researcher Melody Dye wrote about the lab's latest ideas on language learning and development in Scientific American Mind. Her article, The Advantages of Being Helpless, has since been featured on The Atlantic Monthly, American Scientist, the neuropsych blog Mind Hacks, and Jonah Lehrer's popular blog The Frontal Cortex. It was one of Sciam's most popular articles in February.

LA TIMES: The Los Angeles Times discusses Cognition without Control in a new article asking, "Is a toddler's lack of self-control key to early learning?"

US NEWS & WORLD REPORTS: The On Parenting blog talks Cognition without Control with Sharon Thompson-Schill, in the new article Your Kids Can't Say No to Candy? Blame it on their brains.

APS: Wray Herbert reports on Cognition without Control in his Association for Psych Science (APS) blog "We're Only Human," making A Case for the Distractible Toddler.

Student Corner

JUNE: Congratulations to Richard Futrell! Richard's honors thesis in linguistics was selected for the Golden Medal, which recognizes outstanding achievement in the humanities and creative arts. The award is one of the most prestigious and selective that Stanford designates. Richard's work looked at the predictive value of grammatical gender markers in German, showing how grammatical gender reduces the average entropy of German nouns.

APRIL: Congratulations to Ariel James, Justine Kao, Rob Ryan, Melody Dye, and Revanth Kosaraju! The quintet will be presenting their research at professional conferences over the summer, including Cognitive Science, the Society for Philosophy and Psychology (SPP), and the Conceptual Structure Discourse and Language Conference (CSDL). In addition, Revanth is currently a finalist for the SPP poster prize, and Justine and Melody have been awarded conference travel grants.

APRIL: Junior Justine Kao has been selected for the Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) workshop at John Hopkins this summer. The intensive and highly competitive program draws applicants from across the country, and awarded spots to just 5% of applicants this year.

APRIL: Junior Linda Diana Ruiz has won a Stanford major grant funding her study of how contextual cues may prevent overeating. Linda will be conducting her pilot research at the University of Montana this summer.

MARCH: Justine Kao interviews incoming Stanford professor - and former CLL lab manager - Michael Frank, for SymSys Pathways. Mike discusses his formative years in the lab!

MARCH: Second-year grad student Hanna Popick will be presenting her research this month at the International Society on Infant Studies conference in Baltimore. Hanna studies probabilistic and contextual learning in infants.

JANUARY: Junior Justine Kao has won a prestigious Stanford research grant funding her study of how readers of fiction and non-fiction differentially assess writing quality. She will be submitting her preliminary findings to conferences this winter.