SPOTLIGHT - PROFESSOR Lee
This week's spotlight is Dr. Lee. He is a professor in the Department of Cognitive Sciences and teaches COGS 110 (Quantitative Methods) and PSYCH 140C (Cognitive Science). His current research is on modeling human decision making, collective cognition, modeling memory, and improving the development of cognitive models.
Here's what he said!
What research lab do you work in?
Dr. Lee is the Primary Investigator of the Bayesian Cognitive Modeling Lab at UCI. In this lab, graduates and undergraduates evaluate naturally occurring, or collected data, and use Bayesian Methods to model this behavior.
Research in his lab has not been greatly impacted by COVID due to the fact that most data collection is done online. However, he does miss the social aspect of in person lab meetings to share ideas.
Is there a project that you are particularly proud of, or received special recognition for?
He is proud of most of the work lab has produced. Recently, one if his graduate students had an article accepted into one of the top journals in Psychology. This project looked into if and how patients with Alzheimers change the way they think about semantic objects. In particular, evaluating whether these patients maintained memory for the abstract aspects of animals, and focus mainly on physical features.
Do you have any advice for students who want to pursure research in this field, or join your lab?
Make sure you know a coding language! Any language is fine, but if you are able to gain the skills that your lab typically uses then try to focus on that. It would also be in your best interest to be familiar with mathematical and statistical coding information.
For his lab specifically, there are 3 types of research projects undergraduate students can undertake:
- A topic both you and Dr. Lee is are interested in, which will require data collection and designing an experiment. For example, an undergrad was interested in the effects of different rating scales used to evaluate teachers. This student asked questions such as: Would a student rate the same professor higher on the Social Sciences number scale (1-7) than if they were using the Biological Sciences letter scale (A+, A, A-...).
- Evaluate a real-world data source, like using a ranking website. Dr. Lee enjoys using naturally occurring data from a real-world data source because this is behavior that people actually performed. So you don’t need to design an experiment, but you still need to gather some data to test a psychological question.
- Creating cognitive models with Dr. Lee’s collaboration and supervision, if you are skilled at programming. This is what Dr. Lee's graduate students mainly work on.
What careers in industry can you pursue with this line of research?
The largest growing field is Cognitive Data Science. Data Science has been a growing for a number of years, originally designed to evaluate large environmental data sets. Because we have gone online and started carrying smartphones in the last 15 years, there is a mountain of psychological data that needs analysis. With a background in decision-making and judgement, you can help companies fine tune the user experience.
His advice for you:
"If there is a Professor you would like to talk to, have a look at the professor's website so you can launch into a productive conversation -- almost all professors are very delighted to have students who are genuinely interested about their research and motivated. Also, it is good to read a couple of articles that the professor does and see what you find interesting or not.
The first few times undergraduates come to lab meetings, they understand about 10% of the conversation. Don’t let that intimidate you -- engage in lab and you will learn quickly.
Research is entirely about inventing and discovering things that have never been done before -- we can’t possibly know where it is going to go. It would be a big concern if you did know where you were going, then it wouldn’t be research!
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