S C O R D O . com

what does cognition have to do with it

Cognition and Marketing:

When it comes down to it, designing the customer or user experience is about understanding the human brain. Neuromarketing is beginning to take shape and cognitive science will slowy begin defining how products are designed and marketed to consumers and users given more accurate , unbiased consumer insight. The age of the focus group is dead.

My Academic Background:

My academic background includes a Bachelor of Arts degree with departmental commendation from the University of New Hampshire (major: philosophy, minors: linguistics and psychology).

I wrote my interdisciplinary thesis (which was published in the Stanford University Philosophy Journal and awarded top honors at the New England Philosophy Conference) on topics in the philosophy of mind (neurophilosophy, consciousness studies and folk psychology) and cognitive science.

Some of my other cognitive science research includes a research assistantship at the Columbia University Human Communication Lab - where I studied the effects of gaining complex information from simple voice-cues. I've also held a summer long fellowship at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and was awarded a research grant/fellowship to study conceptual change and philosophy of mind while at the University of New Hampshire.

My academic coursework includes advanced seminars in cognitive psychology, psycholinguistics, memory, neurobiology, brain and behavior, brain and language, and consciousness studies.

I am a member of the Usability Professionals' Association and the Human Computer Interaction Network and have attended courses and seminars with the Forrester Research, Nielsen/Norman Group, and Human Factors International.

My prior area of academic interest centers on the idea of reductionism (specifically, eliminative materialism) in the philosophy of mind. Reductionism, quickly defined, is the position that holds that theories or things of one sort can exhaustively account for theories or things of another sort. For example, reductionism within the cognitive sciences holds that neuroscientific theories will explain the success of psychological theories and therefore, will reveal that psychological states and processes are nothing but bodily states processes (MIT E. of Cognitive Science, p. 712). This strict view has been dubbed the identity theory and very few philosophers of mind hold such a radical position; that is to say, many current philosophers of mind (e.g., Dennett, Fodor, Churchland & Churchland, etc.) believe that any theory of mind must be informed by empirical work in the cognitive sciences, though the level of explanatory strength such work will provide is what is in question. In my opinion, then, the aforementioned debate drives the most exciting aspect of contemporary analytic philosophy!

See the following review for an interesting take on folk psychology, the literary novel, and science.