Governing Board Elections

Morten H. Christiansen received his PhD in Cognitive Science from the University of Edinburgh. He is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Psychology at Cornell University, Professor in Cognitive Science at the School of Communication and Culture as well as the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, Denmark, and a Senior Scientist at the Haskins Labs @ Yale. His research focuses on the interaction of biological and environmental constraints in the evolution, acquisition, and processing of language. He employs a variety of methodologies, including computational modeling, corpus analyses, statistical learning, and psycholinguistic experiments, and has authored over 250 scientific papers, two books, and four edited volumes. Christiansen is an elected member of the Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters and the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and an elected Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science and the Cognitive Science Society.

I have been a cognitive scientist and a CSS member all my academic life, receiving my PhD in cognitive science from the University of Edinburgh. Since then I have promoted cognitive science at my academic home institutions, including creating both a graduate program in brain and cognitive science at Southern Illinois University and a cognitive science undergraduate major at Cornell. My first conference talk was at a CogSci conference and I have subsequently been a co-author on more than 50 presentations and been a part or organized several symposia at this conference. Throughout my career, I have engaged with all the component disciplines of cognitive science from philosophy, linguistics, and anthropology to education, psychology, neuroscience, and computer science. As a Governing Board member, I will aim to strengthen the interdisciplinary nature of cognitive science, not only by bolstering its less well-represented core disciplines but also by broadening the scope to include aspects of the humanities. I believe this will make for a more inclusive, diverse, and culturally sensitive approach to understanding the human mind as fundamentally embedded in culture.

A native of Indonesia, Stella Christie graduated from Harvard University with a B.A. in Psychology, Mind Brain Behavior, magna cum laude with highest honors, advised by Elizabeth Spelke. She obtained her Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Northwestern University, advised by Dedre Gentner. Following a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia, Canada, she joined the faculty of Swarthmore College in 2012, earning tenure in 2018. She then moved to Tsinghua University, where she is now Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science and Research Chair at the Tsinghua Laboratory for Brain and Intelligence. She is also the director of the Child Cognition Center at Tsinghua University.

Stella researches the Relational Mind: how cognitive systems learn relations and structures of the world. Using behavioral data from young human children and great apes, Stella’s work has discovered tantalizing similarities and differences between humans’ and other animals’ relational cognition. Eventually, her aim is to chart the precise learning algorithms that any mind uses to abstract relations. Having lived in six countries on all hemispheres, Stella holds special interests in how relational reasoning is influenced by and influences language, culture, and social interactions. In 2016 she was nominated for the James McDonnell Understanding Human Cognition Award.

I have been involved in Cognitive Science Society for 20 years. I have served as Chair of Workshop and Tutorials in 2016 and 2017 and Chair of Awards and Prizes in 2023 and 2024. Given the diversity of my education and academic journey—from Indonesia to Europe to North America to China—one of my primary goals if elected to the Governing Board is to increase the diversity of participants in CogSci meetings. My second goal is to bridge research in cognitive science with policy. Cognitive science research can powerfully and effectively impact many policies but policy makers are often unaware of it. I have extensive experience in public writing and government advising—my writing on media platforms has an estimated readership of 500,000 and my work has been featured on multiple media outlets, including a recent campaign video made by UNICEF China to encourage girls to be scientists. I also serve as Special Advisor to the Minister of Maritime Affairs and Investment of the Republic of Indonesia, advising the government on investment on human capital. I hope to harness these experiences to increase public awareness, especially among policy-makers, of the importance of cognitive science.

I am a cognitive scientist specializing in the interplay between language and cognition. I received my PhD in cognitive science from Johns Hopkins University in 2010, and was awarded the Robert J. Glushko Dissertation Prize from the society in 2011. After a post-doc at the University of Rochester, and an assistant professorship at George Mason University, I moved to the University of Edinburgh in 2014 where I am currently Professor of Experimental Linguistics, in the School of Psychology, Philosophy, and Language Sciences.

I am a member of the Cognitive Science Society and have been for many years. I currently serve on the Conference Committee, and I was conference co-chair in 2022 (Toronto). I am very much committed to cognitive science as an endeavor. My PhD training cemented my belief in the importance of integrating diverse perspectives to the goal of identifying commonalities and differences in human cognition. My research programme since has been dedicated to the empirical investigation of cognitive biases across domains/modalities and individuals—crucially including non-WEIRD populations. The theme of the 2022 conference, Cognitive Diversity, reflected this viewpoint, and this would be my major priority if elected to serve on the Cogsci Governing Board. Specifically, I would work to promote and expand the work the Society has already done (e.g., Diversity and Inclusion awards) to make the field of cognitive science, including the Society, better represent the diversity of cogsci researchers (in terms of fields and geography), and the diversity of human minds that cogsci research targets. An important part of this is outreach—in particular, exposing students to cognitive science early on, and making it accessible to broad communities of young people. I have experience doing this kind of outreach, and I’d be thrilled to help promote this as part of the vision of the Society.

My research goal is to better understand the neural basis of human perception and learning. My trainees and I are interested in how we learn, both from a neural and computational point of view. We study the computational properties of machine learning algorithms and also investigate what physiological recordings and the constraints and limitations of human performance tell us about how our brains learn. Recent topics include: facial expression perception, brain-computer interfaces, and models of visual processing. https://pages.ucsd.edu/~desa/Publications.html

The driving philosophy behind our work is that studying both machine learning and human learning is synergistic. We use insights from human learning and brain physiology to guide machine learning algorithms and ideas from computational algorithms to guide studies of human and animal learning and computation, and develop EEG-based brain computer interfaces. We believe in studying a question, not a technique, and so apply (including through collaboration) a wide range of techniques to address the question of how we learn to perceive the world around us. We also use visual illusions and technology from brain-computer interfaces to pique student interest in the mind and brain; activities include playing with visual illusions, seeing their own brain activity and competing with fellow students in brain-control games.

I am a professor in Cognitive Science, an associate director at the Halıcıoğlu Data Science Institute (HDSI), and an HDSI Chancellor’s endowed Chair at UC San Diego. I first attended the COGSCI Conference in Boulder in 1993 and most recently presented in 2022 in Toronto. I have been on the Program Committee in 2016-2020, and 2024. In 2022, I was a mentor for 4 mentees in the COGSCI 2022 Mentoring Program. I have also been involved in meetings to discuss the future of Cognitive Science, specifically as an invited panelist on the Theories and Methods panel at the Future of Cognitive Science Workshop, UC Merced in 2009, and more recently as an invited speaker and panelist in the Dialogue series: Cognitive Science in Practice and in Theory, at Northwestern in 2022.

I would like to work towards increasing diversity of representation in all areas (including research areas, nationalities, racial backgrounds, genders, and disability challenges) in the Cognitive Science Society. One goal is to work towards increasing consistency of reviewing across areas and working towards making the conference more representative of the full spectrum of cognitive science. In 2023, I was one of four chairs of the Undergraduate Consortium at KDD which included special research, mentorship, and social programming for undergraduates as well as some joint programming with the Graduate student Consortium. NeurIPS now has a call for high school projects. Finding ways to increase outreach to (and benefits of society membership for) students, other new members, and people from underrepresented populations, is another interest.

Biography

• Professor – Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan – 2023 – Present
• Associate Professor – Shizuoka University, Shizuoka, Japan – 2016 – 2022
• Designated Assistant Professor – Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan – 2014 – 2016
• Visiting Assistant Professor – Pennsylvania State University – 2010
• Assistant Professor – Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology, Ishikawa, Japan – 2006 – 2014
• Ph.D. in Human Informatic – Nagoya University, Nagoya, Japan – 2006

Dr. Junya Morita, a Japanese professor majoring in Informatics and Cognitive Science, has conducted research spanning various cognitive faculties, including analogy, creativity, communication, emotion, and motor learning. His experimental and computational works on these topics can be found in the proceedings of past annual meetings of this society. Since his first attendance at CogSci in 2004, he has presented 14 papers and four member abstracts. Throughout his career, his interest lies in developing an international platform bridging interdisciplinary fields of cognition across informatics, linguistics, psychology, and social science. Currently, he serves as a steering committee member of the Japanese Cognitive Science Society, tasked with international affairs to foster connections between Japanese and international communities, particularly in the East Asian region. This includes planning the grassroots event, the CogSci Meetup in Japan, where onsite presenters of CogSci from Japan and local Japanese members will discuss to advance Japanese cognitive science for the future. If elected as a governing board member of the Cognitive Science Society, he will work on broadening cognitive science boundaries worldwide to establish the “practical CogSci perspective” as a common ground for gathering and exploring the potentials of diverse human cognitions.

My academic research focuses on mathematical thinking, perception, and reasoning, with an emphasis on how abstract cognition is distributed across physical and neural structures, perceptions, and behaviors. I also co-founded a startup that teaches mathematical concepts by drawing on research in gesture and perception, and am currently Manager in Content Data Science at Netflix where I lead a team that focuses on machine learning, causal inference, Bayesian statistical modeling, experimentation, and agent-based simulation. I was formerly an associate professor with tenure at Indiana University in Cognitive Science and Psychological and Brain Sciences, and am currently an adjunct professor at the same university. I have been an active member of the Cognitive Science community for nearly 20 years, served as an associate editor of the Cognitive Science journal, and on the program committee for the Society.  I am one of the few members of our society with extensive personal experience of both academic research and industry, and am passionate about building connections between various disciplines and modes of research practice, including via symposia and workshops at recent (and upcoming!) CogSci conferences.  If elected, I would be an enthusiastic advocate for a broad and inclusive approach to cognitive science theory and research.

I’ve been attending the Cognitive Science Society’s annual meetings since I was a graduate student, when it became a natural home for me while pursuing a joint degree in psychology and philosophy. I’m grateful that it is now a home for my lab too: there is no other conference with a tent big enough to fit our work spanning psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science. I’d be thrilled to be able to give back to the society as a governing board member and would focus on ensuring that the society continues to be accessible to everyone engaged in cognitive science, both across disciplines and across differences in resources and lived experiences. Such diversity is critical for cognitive science because differing perspectives allow us to see the problems we work on more clearly. My own research explores how minds represent and reason about possibilities and how that shapes high-level cognition, from decision-making, to linguistic communication, to causal and moral reasoning. I also work on theory of mind, concepts, and formal semantics. After earning a Ph.D. in Psychology and Philosophy at Yale, I was a postdoc in Psychology at Harvard, and am currently an Assistant Professor in Cognitive Science at Dartmouth.