CogSci 2025 SPEAKERS

Moira R. Dillon

2025 Gleitman Prize Keynote

Dr. Dillon is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at New York University.  She received her Ph.D. in Psychology at Harvard University in 2017, following a B.A. in Cognitive Science at Yale University. Dr. Dillon’s research focuses on human understanding of the abstract concepts of Euclidean geometry, especially whether these concepts form a single unitary system, a ‘language of thought’ of geometry.  To address this question, she has examined how aspects of geometry develop from infancy to adulthood, and how geometric principles manifest themselves within different representational domains and task requirements (e.g., object representation, navigation and scene perception, map reading, word learning).  Her findings have challenged the ‘language of thought’ thesis for geometry by showing that infants are sensitive to only some foundational properties of Euclidean geometry (e.g. length relations for 2D planar figures) but not others (e.g. angular relations); and by arguing that what might appear to be a unified geometric system in adults is actually the product of two independent systems (i.e. navigation vs. object recognition)  which appear early in development but are combined over development, possibly through the use of language, a uniquely human capacity.  The early presence of the two systems results in quite different sensitivities to geometric properties depending on the cognitive domains in which they are applied.  Dr. Dillon’s work also probes the effects that this separation of geometric domains has on word learning, showing that generalizations of the meaning of a new word will vary depending on the domain that it engages, and on children’s representations of layouts in drawings, which show strong tendencies to focus on objects rather than scenes.

2025 Rumelhart Prize Keynote

Nora S. Newcombe (Ph.D., Harvard), is Laura H. Carnell Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Temple University. Her research in cognition and cognitive development centers on spatial cognition and episodic memory, along with translational work on STEM education. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. Past honors include the Distinguished Scientific Contributions Award from SRCD, the William James Fellow Award from APS, the Howard Crosby Warren Medal from SEP, and the Award for Distinguished Service to Psychological Science from APA.

Timothy T. Rogers

2025 Elman Prize winner

Tim Rogers received his B.A. in Psychology and English at the University of Waterloo (Canada), Ph.D. in Psychology at the Carnegie Mellon University (US), and was a postdoctoral fellow at the MRC Cognition and Brain Science Unit at the University of Cambridge (UK). Tim began as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (US) in 2004. He currently is a Professor of Psychology, and a Faculty Fellow at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery, University of Wisconsin-Madison.