Lab Overview

The Cognitive Sciences Lab (CSL) pursues interdisciplinary research on individuals and teams to understand cognition broadly construed. At the broader level, CSL has pursued a form of scientific stewardship in the development of the field of team cognition, a melding of cognition with research on how humans interact socially and with technology. This includes the development of a number of edited volumes that have brought together researchers from different disciplines to present their perspectives on team cognition, on complex collaborative problem solving, and on interdisciplinary approaches for studying shared cognition. We have also pursued the development of journal special issues in order to reach targeted audiences who may not be familiar with certain disciplinary perspectives on collaborative cognition. Collectively, these efforts contributed to the overall field of team cognition by bringing together experts in varied fields to present their work in a unified volume or issue to new audiences. At a more narrow range, this includes thinking on teamwork by considering issues surrounding the design and development of human-agent teams, that is, teams composed of humans interacting with autonomous or semi-autonomous intelligent agents or robots. Research in CSL has also studied the development of expertise and pursued interdisciplinary thinking on cognitive processes at the highest levels of proficiency. Research on learning and training by CSL pursues a two-pronged effort involving simulation-based training. We have examined knowledge acquisition and integration in complex domains where the learner has to understand the connection between disparate concepts to comprehend and perform their task and we have examined how multimedia manipulations of learning content (e.g., diagrams and animations), and how interventions designed to scaffold cognitive processes (i.e., metacognitive prompting), can alter knowledge integration.

 

Research Highlights

 

Pinter-Wollman, N., Penn, A., Theraulaz, G., & Fiore, S. M. (2018). Interdisciplinary approaches for uncovering the impacts of architecture on collective behaviour. Special Issue in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 373(1753), 20170232. doi:10.1098/rstb.2017.0232

Fiore, S. M., Graesser, A., & Greiff, S. (2018). Collaborative problem-solving education for the twenty-first-century workforce. Nature Human Behaviour, 2(6), 367–369. doi:10.1038/s41562-018-0363-y

 

   
   

"Deep Agent: A Framework for Information Spread and Evolution in Social Networks." Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Computational Simulation of Online Social Behavior program. PI: Ivan Garibay; Co-PI: G. Sukthankar, S. M. Fiore, A. Mantzaris, ... 

Dr. Stephen M. Fiore appointed to Defense Advanced Research Project Agency's Information Sciences and Technology (ISAT) Study Group.   

 

 


 

Dr. Fiore gives keynote talk "Integrating Theorizing on Embodied, Enactive, Extended, and Embedded Cognition to Augment CSCL Research" at International Conference on Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in Lyon, France.