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Reaching Out Through Research

Jim Clark, Psychology professor

Jim Clark, Psychology professor

Jim Clark, Psychology professor, will be speaking at The University of Winnipeg’s “Brown Bag Lecture” on September 22, 2004 from 12:30 p.m. – 1:00 p.m. in Room 3C01.

The Research and Graduate Studies Office welcomes everyone to bring their lunch and take in this informal gathering that will highlight Dr. Clark’s research.

In is own words, here’s a synopsis of what Dr. Clark will be discussing:

Human cognition, my area of research, examines how the mind/brain works when we perceive, attend, learn, remember, communicate, think, etc. My primary goal is to understand the basic cognitive processes that underlie these more complex behaviours (e.g., how activation and inhibition spreads among verbal and imaginal nodes in semantic memory.)

Understanding such basic processes allows for the construction of mechanistic models to explain the myriad tasks performed by the human mind, and, will ultimately lead to a unified framework akin to those that already exist in more developed sciences.

These basic models and theories that also support well-founded applications in such domains as education and clinical psychology, help us to refute the many (misguided) criticisms of empirical science as a privileged way of knowing, and even provide sound principles by which we can conduct our academic lives, including teaching, scholarship, and governance. Time permitting, I will touch briefly on these extensions and implications of the basic research on human cognition.