Contact Information
Email
Lab Website
(615) 322-1518
215 Hobbs
Research Area
Education
Ph.D. (Cornell University, 1997)
Curriculum Vitae
Advising
Daniel Levin
Professor of Psychology and Human Development
Director of Graduate Studies
Research in the Levin lab is focused on the interface between concepts and visual perception. To this end, we have been exploring the concepts associated with a variety of object categories, and the knowledge that drives visual selection during scene and event perception. Some of our research explores how knowledge and other basic cognitive constraints affect scene and event perception. For example, we are currently exploring how people perceive the sequence of natural visual events, and how they represent space while viewing films. In a related line of research, we are exploring adults' and childrens' concepts about agency, and testing how these concepts affect event perception, human-computer interaction, and learning from agent-based tutoring systems. This line of research represents an interdisciplinary collaboration with our lab, Meg Saylor's lab (Cognitive Development), and labs in engineering (Julie Adams and Gautam Biswas), and it is currently supported by a grant from the NSF.
Currently, the lab includes Alicia Hymel (grad student), Stephen Killingsworth (grad student), and Alex Steger (RA). Grad student alumni include Bonnie Angelone, Melissa Beck, Yukari Takarae, Alex Varakin, and Joe Wayand.
I received by BA from Reed College in 1990, and my Ph.D. at Cornell University in 1997, then moved to a faculty position Kent State University. Starting in 2003, I have been here at Vanderbilt where I am Professor of Psychology in the Peabody's department of Psychology and Human Development.
Representative Publications
Herberg, J.S., Levin, D.T., & Saylor, M, M. (in review). Social audiences can disrupt learning by teaching.
Levin, D.T., Saylor, M.M., Killingsworth, S.S., Gordon, S., & Kawamura, K. (in review). Tests of concepts about different kinds of minds: Predictions about the behavior of comptuers, robots, and people.
Levin, D.T., Saylor, M.M., & Lynn, S.D. (in review). Distinguishing first-line defaults from second-line conceptualization in reasoning about humans, robots, and computers.
Killingsworth, S.S., Saylor, M.M., & Levin, D.T. (in press). Intentional understanding through a machine's eyes. Social Cognition
Somanader, M., Saylor, M.M., & Levin, D.T. (2011). Remote control and children's understanding of robots. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 109, 239-247.
Saylor, M.M., Somanader, M., Levin, D.T., & Kawamura, K. (2010). Defying expectations: How do young children deal with hybrids of basic categories? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 28, 835-851.
Levin, D.T., Angelone, B.L., & Beck, M.R. (2010). Visual search for rare targets: Distractor tuning as a mechanism for learning from repeated target-absent searches. British Journal of Psychology
Levin, D.T. (2010). Spatial representations of the sets of familiar and unfamiliar television programs. Media Psychology, 13(1), 54-76.
Levin, D.T., & Wang, C. (2009). Spatial representation in film. Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 3, 24-52.
Herberg, J.S., Saylor, M.M., Ratanaswasd, R., Levin, D.T., Wilkes, M. (2008). Audience-contingent variation in action demonstrations for humans and computers. Cognitive Science, 32, 1003-1020.
Hunter, J.E., Wilkes, D.M., Levin, D.T., Heaton, C., & Saylor M.M. (2008). Autonomous segmentation of human action for behavior analysis. Proceedings of the 7th Annual International Conference on Development and Learning, 7, 250-255.
Beck, M. R., Angelone, B.A., Levin, D.T., Peterson, M.S., & Varakin, D.A. (2008) Implicit learning for probable changes in a visual change detection task. Consciousness and Cognition, 17, 1192-1208.
Levin, D.T., & Saylor, M.M (2008). Shining spotlights, zooming lenses, grabbing hands, and pecking chickens: The ebb and flow of attention during events. In T. Shipley, and J. Zacks (Eds), Understanding events: From perception to action. (pp. 522-554). New York: Oxford University Press.
Levin, D.T., Killingsworth, S.S., Saylor, M.M. (2008). Concepts about the capabilities of computers and robots: A test of the scope of adults' theory of mind. Proceedings of the 3rd Annual IEEE International Workshop on Human and Robot Interaction, 3, 57-64.
Varakin, D.A., & Levin, D.T. (2008). Scene structure enhances change detection. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. 61, 543-551.
Varakin, D.A., Levin, D.T., & Collins, K. (2007). Comparison and representation failures both cause real-world change blindness. Perception, 36, 737-749.
Beck, M.R., Levin, D.T., & Angelone, B.L. (2007). Change blindness blindness: Beliefs about the roles of intention and scene complexity in change detection. Consciousness and Cognition, 16, 31-51.
Levin, D.T., & Banaji, M.R. (2006). Distortions in the perceived lightness of faces: The role of race categories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 135, 501-512.
Arrington, J.G., Levin, D.T., & Varakin, D.A. (2006). Color onsets and offsets, and luminance changes can cause change blindness. Perception, 35, 1665-1678.
Levin, D.T., Saylor, M.M., Varakin, D.A., Gordon, S.M., Kawamura, K, & Wilkes, D.M. (2006). Thinking about thinking in computers, robots, and people. Proceedings of the 5th Annual International Conference on Development and Learning, 5, 49.
Varakin, D.A., & Levin, D.T. (2006). How can visual memory be so good if change detection is so bad? Visual representations get rich so they can act poor. British Journal of Psychology, 91, 51-77.