Overview
The Laboratory For Complex Thinking and Scientific Reasoning conducts research that spans the domains of Cognitive Psychology, Cognitive Science, Educational Neuroscience, and Cognitive Neuroscience. The overall focus of our research is to discover and foster the psychologically and educationally important mental processes underlying Thinking, Reasoning, Problem Solving, and Creativity. The goal of our work is to harness these findings in ways that facilitate the learning of concepts in both science and the arts and facilitate their transfer into the real world. We use controlled laboratory experiments, real-world educational settings, genetic analyses, and fMRI to investigate these issues. As well as providing new models of higher level cognition, this work has many important practical implications involving insights into the ways that science is conducted, scientists are taught in schools and universities, and how industrial and academic laboratories are best structured to ensure success. The hallmark of our research is that we investigate higher-level cognition from multiple perspectives and use many different methodologies. The use of different converging methodologies makes it possible to propose models that are applicable across a wide variety of contexts and provide insights into the nature of what it means to be a sentient human being.