Overview
What does it mean by acquiring new knowledge? How does the new knowledge affect our behavior? These traditional riddles of human knowledge acquisition leads to, at least, two important research questions in cognitive psychology. One question has to do with transforming physical stimuli. That is, given the physical data that reaches our sensory systems (e.g., light falling on the retina), how do the systems transform the physical information into a medium useful for higher cognitive activities such as reasoning? The other question taps into the issue of meaning. After transforming the physical information into a mental representation relevant for further processing, how do we acquire meaning? How do we integrate a new representation into an existing conceptual structure? Without doubt, the study of knowledge acquisition involves a wide array of disciplines including visual perception, attention, memory, concept formation, and reasoning. Our research has addressed these fundamental questions of knowledge acquisition by focusing on the issues relevant to visual object recognition, concept formation, and inductive reasoning.
Contact Information
Takashi Yamauchi
Mail Stop: 4235
Department of Psychoogy
Texas A&M University
College Station, TX 77845 USAPhone: 979-845-2503
Email: tya(at)psyc.tamu.edu
