Associate Professor of Cognitive Science.
Mark Blair is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department and the Cognitive Science Program. His broad interest is in attention and learning, and he uses computational, experimental and big data approaches to study these processes in a variety of laboratory and non-laboratory tasks. In his spare time he enjoys sketching, and playing Dota 2 (and StarCraft 2). He also loves movies!
Robin is the current Student Lead for the Cognitive Science Lab and is also a Graduate Student in the Psychology program in the Historical, Quantitative, and Theoretical Track. As part of their research, Robin is exploring new methods for analyzing performance data from eSports athletes. Their passion for psychology stems from a keen interest in exploring how psychological principles can be applied to the design of video games and other virtual environments to make these expereinces more immersive and enjoyable. Outside of academia, Robin is an avid lover of craft beer, playing guitar, and trudging through a long to-do list of classic video games.
Justin is a graduate student currently pursuing an MA in cognitive science. He has BA degrees in both psychology and criminal justice from the University of Nevada, Reno. His interests are in learning expertise skills. Specifically the processes in which people learn complex skills in video games. He is also interested how teamwork and cooperation factor into the learning process. When not in the lab, he likes to play various video games such as Overwatch and League of Legends. He also spends his spare time playing goalie for hockey at the local rinks.
Kat is the other lab coordinator. She is pursuing a cognitive science major and a criminology minor. Kat loves to learn and is eager to continue picking up new research skills in the lab. She hopes to continue her academic journey in grad school exploring how findings from cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be applied to criminological research and legal proceedings. When she isn’t busy debugging code or playing volleyball, you can find her studying in Starbucks or rewatching Prison Break on Netflix.
Cal Woodruff is a Computing Science student at SFU with a focus on data mining and distributed computing. Among many other things, he is interested in human cognition from an archaeological and evolutionary perspective.
Rollin is a Cognitive Science major and minoring in Interactive Arts and Technology. His research interests include user experience/HCI, visual perception, and definitional boundaries. He does not like writing autobiographical blurbs.
Ruilin is an undergraduate Criminology major student. He is interested in distributed cognition, artificial intelligence, and especially the development of technology that affects human perceptual learning over time. He is willing to learn more about computational analysis in cognitive research in CSL. In his spare time he enjoys reading, playing video games such as Dota 2, listening to music and jogging.
Christine is an undergraduate Psychology major. She is interested in data analysis and hopes to gain research experience from the lab. In her free time, she likes cooking and listening to music.
Amanda is a Cognitive Science undergrad. She is interested in embodied cognition and the neural correlates of representation. Her interests include movies and video games.
Tyrus Tracey is currently pursuing a Cognitive Science degree. He joined the lab to learn more about how people learn tasks in computer-mediated environments. On the side Tyrus practices his drumming skills and is the current arcade champion among his friends.
Scott in an undergraduate student in Cognitive Science. His interests include the problems that arise when studying large non-experimental datasets where skill can be measured in a naturalized environment, such as video game replays. He enjoys both the empirical questions that arise and the data analytic problems that are necessary to tease apart, or arrive at, those questions. He also has a broad interest in Computational Social Sciences & the Digital Humanities, as well as a budding interest in Machine Learning. His hobbies include Single Board Computing, such as using and programming the Raspberry Pi, Beagle Board, or Jetson Nano in fun areas like Robotics and Computer Vision. He is also interested in the Middle East, on the one hand travelling in the region, on the other it’s history, architecture, cultures, & regional current events. He is an avid follower of the News, which these days is more of a draining curse than an interest. He also likes to draw and has learned to meditate, which lighten up life when not indulging in the other interests mentioned above.
Rohan is a third-year undergraduate student at Simon Fraser University, majoring in Computing Science and Linguistics. He is interested in Computational Linguistics, Natural Language Processing, and Sentiment Analysis. He has also worked as a research assistant for the SFU Discourse Processing Lab under Dr. Maite Taboada and has presented research on the importance of sociolinguistics in the fields of political science and cognitive science. He is currently working on language preservation efforts for Hul'qumi'num, an Indigenous language of the Coast Salish People. He enjoys spending his spare time performing spoken word poetry, watching true crime documentaries, and taking care of Artemis, his pet cocker spaniel.