Michael Lee, cognitive sciences professor, has received a $182,362 grant from the National Science Foundation to develop cognitive models that will help scientists understand the processes involved in how people learn categories. In the last 10 years, new behavioral and brain imaging data has led to a diversification in theories of category learning, and the idea that people have multiple learning systems has become prominent. Lee’s work aims to try and rein in this diversity, using statistical  methods to  identify how many category learning processes are fundamentally important, and then developing cognitive models that include these processes. Working with him will be a cognitive sciences graduate student who specializes in cognitive modeling.

The grant is a subcontract to a larger study in progress at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Lee’s portion is funded from March 2013-February 2016.