The Department of Psychology at The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, invites applications for a full-time Assistant or Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology with anticipated start date of August, 2025. Areas of specialization within cognitive psychology are open and may include (but are not limited to) such topics as cognitive control, creativity, computational approaches and modelling, motor control, language science, memory, attention, perception, and decision making. A record of collaboration is desirable for both ranks. Substantial collaboration opportunities exist within the department that align with the department’s cross-cutting research themes and across campus. Current faculty in the cognitive area are active in units including the Center for Language Sciences, the Social Life and Engineering Sciences Imaging Center, the Center for Healthy Aging, the Center for Brain, Behavior, and Cognition and the Applied Research Lab. Responsibilities of the Assistant or Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology include maintaining a strong record of publications in top outlets. This position will include resident instruction at the undergraduate and graduate level and normal university service, based on the candidate’s qualifications. A Ph.D. in Psychology or related field is required by the appointment date for both ranks. Candidates for the tenure-track Assistant Professor of Cognitive Psychology position must have demonstrated ability as a researcher, scholar, and teacher in a relevant field and have evidence of growth in scholarly achievement. Duties will involve a combination of teaching, research, and service, based on the candidate’s qualifications. Candidates for the tenure-track Associate Professor of Cognitive Psychology position must have demonstrated excellence as a researcher, scholar, and teacher in a relevant field and have an established reputation in scholarly achievement. Duties will involve a combination of teaching, research, and service, based on the candidate’s qualifications. The ideal candidate will have a strong record of publications in top outlets and have a history of or potential for external funding. In addition, successful candidates must either have demonstrated a commitment to building an inclusive, equitable, and diverse campus community, or describe one or more ways they would envision doing so, given the opportunity. Review of applications will begin immediately and will continue until the position is filled. Interested candidates should submit an online application at Penn State’s Job Posting Board, and should upload the following application materials electronically: (1) a Cover letter of application, (2) Concise statements of research and teaching interests, (3) a CV and (4) three selected (re)prints. System limitations allow for a total of 5 documents (5mb per document) as part of your application. Please combine materials to meet the 5-document limit. In addition, please arrange to have three letters of recommendation sent electronically to PsychApplications@psu.edu with the subject line: “Cognitive Psychology” Questions regarding the application process can be emailed to PsychApplications@psu.edu and questions regarding the position can be sent to the search chair: cogsearch@psu.edu. The Pennsylvania State University is committed to and accountable for advancing diversity, equity, and inclusion in all of its forms. We embrace individual uniqueness, foster a culture of inclusion that supports both broad and specific diversity initiatives, leverage the educational and institutional benefits of diversity, and engage all individuals to help them thrive. We value inclusion as a core strength and an essential element of our public service mission. Penn State offers competitive benefits to full-time employees, including medical, dental, vision, and retirement plans, in addition to 75% tuition discounts (including for a spouse and dependent children up to the age of 26) and paid holidays.

There are many mysteries in the universe. One of the most significant, often considered the final frontier in science, is understanding how our subjective experience, or consciousness, emerges from the collective action of neurons in biological systems. While substantial progress has been made over the past decades, a unified and widely accepted explanation of the neural mechanisms underpinning consciousness remains elusive. The field is rife with theories that frequently provide contradictory explanations of the phenomenon. To accelerate progress, we have adopted a new model of science: adversarial collaboration in team science. Our goal is to test theories of consciousness in an adversarial setting. Adversarial collaboration offers a unique way to bolster creativity and rigor in scientific research by merging the expertise of teams with diverse viewpoints. Ideally, we aim to harness collective intelligence, embracing various perspectives, to expedite the uncovering of scientific truths. In this talk, I will highlight the effectiveness (and challenges) of this approach using selected case studies, showcasing its potential to counter biases, challenge traditional viewpoints, and foster innovative thought. Through the joint design of experiments, teams incorporate a competitive aspect, ensuring comprehensive exploration of problems. This method underscores the importance of structured conflict and diversity in propelling scientific advancement and innovation.

Analogical reasoning –learning about new things by relating it to previous knowledge– lies at the heart of human intelligence and creativity and forms the core of educational practice. Children start creating and using analogies early on, making incredible progress moving from associative processes to successful analogical reasoning. For example, if we ask a four-year-old “Horse belongs to stable like chicken belongs to …?” they may use association and reply “egg”, whereas older children will likely give the intended relational response “chicken coop” (or other term to refer to a chicken’s home). Interestingly, despite state-of-the-art AI-language models having superhuman encyclopedic knowledge and superior memory and computational power, our pilot studies show that these large language models often make mistakes providing associative rather than relational responses to verbal analogies. For example, when we asked four- to eight-year-olds to solve the analogy “body is to feet as tree is to …?” they responded “roots” without hesitation, but large language models tend to provide more associative responses such as “leaves”. In this study we examine the similarities and differences between children's and six large language models' (Dutch/multilingual models: RobBERT, BERT-je, M-BERT, GPT-2, M-GPT, Word2Vec and Fasttext) responses to verbal analogies extracted from an online adaptive learning environment, where >14,000 7-12 year-olds from the Netherlands solved 20 or more items from a database of 900 Dutch language verbal analogies.

We welcome Kenji López-Alt, world-renowned chef and author of multiple New York Times bestselling cook books, including The Food Lab: Better Home Cooking Through Science. Kenji will discuss the creativity and science of the culinary arts with Indre Viskontas.

Semantic cognition brings meaning to our world – it allows us to make sense of what we see and hear, and to produce adaptive thoughts and behaviour. Since we have a wealth of information about any given concept, our store of knowledge is not sufficient for successful semantic cognition; we also need mechanisms that can steer the information that we retrieve so it suits the context or our current goals. This talk traces the neural networks that underpin this flexibility in semantic cognition. It draws on evidence from multiple methods (neuropsychology, neuroimaging, neural stimulation) to show that two interacting heteromodal networks underpin different aspects of flexibility. Regions including anterior temporal cortex and left angular gyrus respond more strongly when semantic retrieval follows highly-related concepts or multiple convergent cues; the multivariate responses in these regions correspond to context-dependent aspects of meaning. A second network centred on left inferior frontal gyrus and left posterior middle temporal gyrus is associated with controlled semantic retrieval, responding more strongly when weak associations are required or there is more competition between concepts. This semantic control network is linked to creativity and also captures context-dependent aspects of meaning; however, this network specifically shows more similar multivariate responses across trials when association strength is weak, reflecting a common controlled retrieval state when more unusual associations are the focus. Evidence from neuropsychology, fMRI and TMS suggests that this semantic control network is distinct from multiple-demand cortex which supports executive control across domains, although challenging semantic tasks recruit both networks. The semantic control network is juxtaposed between regions of default mode network that might be sufficient for the retrieval of strong semantic relationships and multiple-demand regions in the left hemisphere, suggesting that the large-scale organisation of flexible semantic cognition can be understood in terms of cortical gradients that capture systematic functional transitions that are repeated in temporal, parietal and frontal cortex.

Studies reported the effects of different types and different levels of abstraction of analogical stimuli on designers. However, specific, single visual analogical stimuli on the effects of designers have not been reported. We define this type of stimuli as specific analogical stimuli. We used the extended linkography method to analyze the facilitating and limiting effects of specific analogical stimuli and free association analogical stimuli (nonspecific analogical stimuli) on the students' creativity at different design levels. Through an empirical study, we explored the differences in the effects of specific analogy stimuli on the students at different design levels. It clarifies the use of analogical stimuli in design and the teaching of analogical design methods in design education.

Join us for a conversation on the science of uncertainty, mind wandering and creativity!

Join us for a conversation on the science of uncertainty, mind wandering and creativity!

A key component of humans' striking creativity in solving problems is our ability to construct novel descriptions to help us characterize novel categories. Bongard problems, which challenge the problem solver to come up with a rule for distinguishing visual scenes that fall into two categories, provide an elegant test of this ability. Bongard problems are challenging for both human and machine category learners because only a handful of example scenes are presented for each category, and they often require the open-ended creation of new descriptions. A new sub-type of Bongard problem called Physical Bongard Problems (PBPs) is introduced, which require solvers to perceive and predict the physical spatial dynamics implicit in the depicted scenes. The PATHS (Perceiving And Testing Hypotheses on Structures) computational model which can solve many PBPs is presented, and compared to human performance on the same problems. PATHS and humans are similarly affected by the ordering of scenes within a PBP, with spatially and temporally juxtaposed scenes promoting category learning when they are similar and belong to different categories, or dissimilar and belong to the same category. The core theoretical commitments of PATHS which we believe to also exemplify human open-ended category learning are a) the continual perception of new scene descriptions over the course of category learning; b) the context-dependent nature of that perceptual process, in which the scenes establish the context for one another; c) hypothesis construction by combining descriptions into logical expressions; and d) bi-directional interactions between perceiving new aspects of scenes and constructing hypotheses for the rule that distinguishes categories.

Creative thought relies on the reorganisation of existing knowledge. Sleep is known to be important for creative thinking, but there is a debate about which sleep stage is most relevant, and why. I will address this issue by proposing that Rapid Eye Movement sleep, or 'REM', and Non-REM sleep facilitate creativity in different ways. Memory replay mechanisms in Non-REM can abstract rules from corpuses of learned information, while replay in REM may promote novel associations. I propose that the iterative interleaving of REM and Non-REM across a night boosts the formation of complex knowledge frameworks, and allows these frameworks to be restructured - thus facilitating creative thought. My talk will discuss experiments exploring these hypotheses, and the mechanisms for these processes.