Cog Sci Featured News

Ten social sciences students were among the 32 outstanding seniors selected this year for the inaugural Chancellor’s Award of Distinction. Coordinated through the UCI Alumni Association, the honor recognizes graduating seniors who show exemplary character while an undergrad at UCI, devoting their time and talents to benefit the campus community through research, leadership or service.

It may be UC Irvine’s 47th annual commencement, but that doesn’t mean the campus is short on firsts. New programs and traditions constantly enrich the graduation ceremonies, and this year is no exception.

The university honored staff on June 14 for hitting career service milestones within the University of California system. Staff with 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35 and 40 years of service received recognition along with a number of supervisors – including Helen Morgan, Social Sciences Undergraduate Student Affairs director - who were nominated by their staff for the 2012 Excellence in Leadership award.

From News Track India:

Jon Sprouse, cognitive sciences assistant professor, has received the Linguistic Society of America’s 2011 Best Paper in Language award for “A Test of the Cognitive Assumptions of Magnitude Estimation: Commutativity Does Not Hold for Acceptability Judgments.” The honor recognizes the best paper(s) published in the society’s premiere journal, Language, in any given year

For those who follow football (as if there was anything else on TV through fall), late October upsets for Oklahoma and Wisconsin meant a mid-season shake up in the college BCS rankings, and some presumably upset Vegas odds-makers. Following the action both on the field and in the over/unders (both by observation only) has been UCI cognitive sciences professor Michael Lee, one of football’s newer fans.

From the Huffington Post:

The School of Social Sciences Anechoic Facility opened in fall 2011 as a shared school resource for use by all faculty who have an interest in auditory research. The facility includes a large (12.5′x12.5′x7′ interior) acoustically isolated RF-shielded chamber for free-field research and a second smaller RF-shielded steel booth for research using headphones.

Greg Hickok, cognitive sciences professor and founding director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has received a $257,960 grant from the National Institutes of Health to further his research on the brain’s role in speech and how abnormalities can inhibit this process.  The funding adds to the $9.3 million he has already received for research in this area, and allows him to add postdoctoral researcher Kayoko Okada, a 2005 gradu

From The Loh Down:
A limbal ring is a dark circle around the iris -- the colored part of the eye. Because limbal rings diminish with age, they're more COMMON in young, healthy people, and more VISIBLE in those with light-colored eyes. University of California, Irvine, psychology graduate student Darren Peshek takes it one step further. He says limbal rings give people an automatic way to judge each other's facial attractiveness.

Visit http://lohdown.caltech.edu/script_archive for a script.