Our department has six areas of concentration. Although there is a good deal of collaboration and interaction across groups, each area of concentration has its own requirements for graduate study and students are typically admitted into one of these areas of concentration.
Biology of Brain and Behavior: Topic areas investigated by our faculty include psychoneuroimmunology, hormone-behavior relationships, neurobiology of stress and arousal, sensory processes, and the neural organization of the cerebral cortex.
- Clinical: Topic areas investigated by our faculty include psychometric methods, assessment, clinical research methods, psychotherapy/intervention, biological aspects of behavior, assessment of cognitive processes, developmental perspectives on psychopathology, and psychiatric genetics and epigenetics.
- Cognitive and Cognitive Neuroscience: Areas investigated by our faculty include topics related to learning (e.g. statistical learning, mathematical learning, learning of object categories, and transfer of learned skills), language (e.g. language production, semantic knowledge, and reading) and memory (e.g. the neural basis of short-term memory and the development of short-term memory skills).
- Developmental: Topic areas investigated by our faculty include the development of mathematical reasoning/problem solving, visuospatial cognition, and social cognition, the interaction of cognitive and motor development in symbolic reasoning, temperament and affective development, gender role development, developmental psychopathology, effects of stress on development, resiliency in adulthood and aging, and language acquisition.
- Perception: Topic areas investigated by our faculty include: Visual motion and depth perception, perceptual learning and transfer, decision-making, auditory processing and neural coding.
- Social and Personality: Topic areas investigated by our faculty include motivation, prejudice and discrimination, physiological, social, cognitive and cultural aspects of emotions and emotional information processing, and issues in gender and sexual behavior.