Reminiscing and representing at Reed College
June 12, 2008
My undergraduate thesis advisor, Allen Neuringer, a wonderfully creative, personable, and highly renowned Psychologist is retiring this coming year. In his honor, the Psychology Department at Reed held a conference-style reunion for academic and non-academic Psychologists from all graduating years. Allen has done tremendously interesting work on the reinforcement of variable behavior and is a proponent of self-experimentation. He has been an extraordinary mentor to me and to generations of Reed graduates.
On the first day of the associated conference, I presented my new work on the “SIMPLE” model, a general model of social behavior (see the research page of my website) and had the opportunity to meet a number of researchers with unconventional approaches to scientific inquiry. Among the highlights were:
1) meeting and developing a potential collaboration with Jon Schull of Rochester Institute of Technology on innovation and agent-environment interaction
2) talking with Seth Roberts, self-experimenter, author of the book “The Shangri-La Diet,” and professor emeritus at Berkley, about the potential importance of oscillations in resource availability (and other environmental inputs) in shaping eating and social behavior, and
3) hearing Michael Owren’s talk on laughter and speaking with him afterwards about the relationship between his theoretical approach to signaling and the passive/active signaling distinction I developed in the final chapter of my dissertation.
