Interests
As an instructor, I am deeply interested in studying pedagogical issues in post-secondary education. Specifically, I am drawn towards the interface between technology and the classroom – electronic textbooks, student response systems, internet access during class time, interactive applets, etc. – and the effects that technology can have on learning.
I am also interested in a range of cognitive science topics with a primary focus on evolutionary simulations of attention and learning. I use simulated evolution as a means to investigate the types of environmental information structures that lead to the emergence of attention as an adaptive mechanism. I employ genetic algorithms to evolve simple connectionist networks in a range of environments. These environments may vary in terms of the underlying structure of the cues and responses, the temporal structure, or the amount of noise that is present in the environment. I then analyze the evolved agents to determine if they show signs of attentional behavior. The primary goal of this work is to explain attentional behaviors as adaptive evolved responses that can only be fully understood in the context of the environments that gave rise to them.