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Russell Epstein is a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania, who studies neural mechanisms underlying visual scene perception, event perception, object recognition, and spatial navigation in humans. His lab studies the role of the Parahippocampal and retrosplenial cortices in determining how people orient themselves relative to their surroundings. [1] [2]
Epstein received an undergraduate degree in physics at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in computer vision with Alan Yuille at Harvard. [3] He also held postdoctoral fellowships with Nancy Kanwisher (1997-1999) at MIT and John Duncan (1999-2001) at the MRC-CBU. [3] [4] [5]
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in (contemporary) epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:
Existence is the state of being real or participating in reality. The terms "being", "reality", and "actuality" are often used as close synonyms. Existence contrasts with nonexistence, nothingness, and nonbeing. A common distinction is between the existence of an entity and its essence, which refers to the entity's nature or essential qualities.
Knowledge is an awareness of facts, a familiarity with individuals and situations, or a practical skill. Knowledge of facts, also called propositional knowledge, is often characterized as true belief that is distinct from opinion or guesswork by virtue of justification. While there is wide agreement among philosophers that propositional knowledge is a form of true belief, many controversies focus on justification. This includes questions like how to understand justification, whether it is needed at all, and whether something else besides it is needed. These controversies intensified in the latter half of the 20th century due to a series of thought experiments that provoked alternative definitions.
Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. In this sense, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.
Empirical evidence for a proposition is evidence, i.e. what supports or counters this proposition, that is constituted by or accessible to sense experience or experimental procedure. Empirical evidence is of central importance to the sciences and plays a role in various other fields, like epistemology and law.
The MIT Media Lab is a research laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, growing out of MIT's Architecture Machine Group in the School of Architecture. Its research does not restrict to fixed academic disciplines, but draws from technology, media, science, art, and design. As of 2014, Media lab's research groups include neurobiology, biologically inspired fabrication, socially engaging robots, emotive computing, bionics, and hyperinstruments.
Joichi "Joi" Ito is a Japanese entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the President of Chiba Institute of Technology. He is a former director of the MIT Media Lab, former professor of the practice of media arts and sciences at MIT, and a former visiting professor of practice at Harvard Law School. Ito has received recognition for his role as an entrepreneur focused on Internet and technology companies and has founded, among other companies, PSINet Japan, Digital Garage, and Infoseek Japan. Ito is general partner of Neoteny Labs, and former board member of Creative Commons, The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, The New York Times Company, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, The Mozilla Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and Sony Corporation. Ito wrote a monthly column in the Ideas section of Wired.
Credibility comprises the objective and subjective components of the believability of a source or message. Credibility dates back to Aristotle theory of Rhetoric. Aristotle defines rhetoric as the ability to see what is possibly persuasive in every situation. He divided the means of persuasion into three categories, namely Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, which he believed have the capacity to influence the receiver of a message. According to Aristotle, the term "Ethos" deals with the character of the speaker. The intent of the speaker is to appear credible. In fact, the speaker's ethos is a rhetorical strategy employed by an orator whose purpose is to "inspire trust in his audience." Credibility has two key components: trustworthiness and expertise, which both have objective and subjective components. Trustworthiness is based more on subjective factors, but can include objective measurements such as established reliability. Expertise can be similarly subjectively perceived, but also includes relatively objective characteristics of the source or message. Secondary components of credibility include source dynamism (charisma) and physical attractiveness.
A mental state, or a mental property, is a state of mind of a person. Mental states comprise a diverse class, including perception, pain/pleasure experience, belief, desire, intention, emotion, and memory. There is controversy concerning the exact definition of the term. According to epistemic approaches, the essential mark of mental states is that their subject has privileged epistemic access while others can only infer their existence from outward signs. Consciousness-based approaches hold that all mental states are either conscious themselves or stand in the right relation to conscious states. Intentionality-based approaches, on the other hand, see the power of minds to refer to objects and represent the world as the mark of the mental. According to functionalist approaches, mental states are defined in terms of their role in the causal network independent of their intrinsic properties. Some philosophers deny all the aforementioned approaches by holding that the term "mental" refers to a cluster of loosely related ideas without an underlying unifying feature shared by all. Various overlapping classifications of mental states have been proposed. Important distinctions group mental phenomena together according to whether they are sensory, propositional, intentional, conscious or occurrent. Sensory states involve sense impressions like visual perceptions or bodily pains. Propositional attitudes, like beliefs and desires, are relations a subject has to a proposition. The characteristic of intentional states is that they refer to or are about objects or states of affairs. Conscious states are part of the phenomenal experience while occurrent states are causally efficacious within the owner's mind, with or without consciousness. An influential classification of mental states is due to Franz Brentano, who argues that there are only three basic kinds: presentations, judgments, and phenomena of love and hate.
Stephen Michael Kosslyn is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. Kosslyn is best known for his work on visual imagery and the science of learning. Kosslyn currently serves as the president of Active Learning Sciences Inc., which helps institutions design active-learning based courses and educational programs. He is also the founder and chief academic officer of Foundry College, an online two-year college.
Music psychology, or the psychology of music, may be regarded as a branch of both psychology and musicology. It aims to explain and understand musical behaviour and experience, including the processes through which music is perceived, created, responded to, and incorporated into everyday life. Modern music psychology is primarily empirical; its knowledge tends to advance on the basis of interpretations of data collected by systematic observation of and interaction with human participants. Music psychology is a field of research with practical relevance for many areas, including music performance, composition, education, criticism, and therapy, as well as investigations of human attitude, skill, performance, intelligence, creativity, and social behavior.
Nancy Gail Kanwisher FBA is the Walter A Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an investigator at the McGovern Institute for Brain Research. She studies the neural and cognitive mechanisms underlying human visual perception and cognition.
Robert Epstein is an American psychologist, professor, author, and journalist. He was awarded a Ph.D. in psychology by Harvard University in 1981, was editor in chief of Psychology Today, and has held positions at several universities including Boston University, University of California, San Diego, and Harvard University. He is also the founder and director emeritus of the Cambridge Center for Behavioral Studies in Concord, MA. In 2012, he founded the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology (AIBRT), a nonprofit organization that conducts research to promote the well-being and functioning of people worldwide.
Jeffrey Burton Russell was an American historian of medieval Europe and religious studies scholar.
Michael A. Hogg is a British psychologist, and Professor of Social Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Claremont Graduate University in Los Angeles. He is also an honorary Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Kent in the UK.
W. Russell Neuman is Professor of Media Technology, NYU Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development and Professor (Emeritus), Communication Studies, University of Michigan. From 2001 to 2013, Dr. Neuman was the John Derby Evans Professor of Media Technology at the University of Michigan. Neuman received a Ph.D. And M.A. At the University of California, Berkeley Department of Sociology as well as a B.A. from Cornell University's Department of Government. He has an extensive teaching and research career at Yale University, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Michigan. He is one of the founding faculty members at MIT Media Lab and with Ithiel de Sola Pool, MIT's Research Program on Communication Policy. From 2001-2003 he served as a Senior Policy Analyst in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy working in the areas of information technology, broadband policy as well as biometrics and international security.
The Jeffrey Epstein VI Foundation was a private foundation established in 2000 by New York convicted sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein. Officially registered as J. Epstein VI Foundation, the "VI" stands for Virgin Islands, where the foundation was based and Epstein owned a private island. The foundation's board included Cecile de Jongh, wife of the former governor of the United States Virgin Islands, John de Jongh.
Cynthia Fuchs Epstein is an American sociologist and emeritus distinguished professor of sociology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Fuchs Epstein served as president of the American Sociological Association in 2006.
Eleanor Jack Gibson was an American psychologist who focused on reading development and perceptual learning in infants. Gibson began her career at Smith College as an instructor in 1932, publishing her first works on research conducted as an undergraduate student. Gibson was able to circumvent the many obstacles she faced due to the Great Depression and gender discrimination, by finding research opportunities that she could meld with her own interests. Gibson, with her husband James J. Gibson, created the Gibsonian ecological theory of development, which emphasized how important perception was because it allows humans to adapt to their environments. Perhaps her most well-known contribution to psychology was the "visual cliff," which studied depth perception in both human and animal species, leading to a new understanding of perceptual development in infants. Gibson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1971, the National Academy of Education in 1972, and to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1977. In 1992, she was awarded the National Medal of Science.
Kristen A. Lindquist is a psychologist and affective neuroscientist whose research focuses on language, emotions, and culture. Lindquist is known for her work on emotion words, suggesting that when speakers of different languages talk about common emotions like love, they may not mean the same thing. Her findings run counter to the view that there are universal emotions that are experienced the same across cultures. Lindquist is Associate Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience and Director of Carolina Affective Science Lab at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
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