Dr. Michael Young received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities in 1995. Mike began his career as a computer scientist out of the University of Illinois in 1984 with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence. After completing his Ph.D., Mike was at the University of Iowa as a postdoctoral associate and adjunct assistant professor. Dr. Young has published a number of papers on predictive learning in people and on variability discrimination in people and pigeons. His research on predictive learning focuses on the acquisition of information about causal interactions and the temporal relationships among events in learning tasks. Mike's work on variability discrimination centers on identifying the variables that affect the determination of how much variety there is in a collection of items (e.g., organization of items, visual similarity, number, and training task). He continues to integrate his background in computer science with his interest in psychology through the development of computational models of cognitive processes.

Michael Young Professor of Psychology Department of Psychology 271F Life Sciences II Southern Illinois University Carbondale, IL 62901-6502 Phone: (618) 453-3567 Fax: (618) 453-3563 E-mail: meyoung@siu.edu Home Page Research Lab Young Cognition Laboratory Undergraduate Courses PSYC 211: Research Methods in Psychology PSYC 389: Dog Behavior PSYC 471/528: Judgment and Decision Making PSYC 489: Predicting the Future: Mind or Mathematics? Graduate Courses PSYC 575: Computational Modeling Collaborators Ed Wasserman Aaron Blaisdell Olga Lazareva Josh Beckmann Olga Falmier Roberto Limongi

Young, M.E., & Racey, D. (in press).  Judgments of creativity as a function of visual stimulus variability. Empirical Studies of the Arts.

Young, M.E. (2008).  Nonlinear judgment analysis: Comparing policy use by those who draft and those who coach. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 9, 760-774.

Lazareva, O.F., Miner, M., Wasserman, E.A., and Young, M.E. (2008).  Multiple-pair training enhances transposition in pigeons.  Learning and Behavior, 36, 174-187.

Falmier, O., & Young, M.E. (2008).  The impact of perceived animacy on causal judgments. American Journal of Psychology, 121, 473-500.

Young, M.E., & Falmier, O. (2008).  Launching at a distance: The effect of spatial markers.  Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 61, 1356-1370.

Young, M.E., & Falmier, O. (2008).  Color change as a causal agent: Revisited.  American Journal of Psychology, 121, 129-157.

Young, M.E., Wasserman, E.A., & Ellefson, M.R. (2007).  A theory of variability discrimination: Finding differences.  Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14, 805-822.

Beckmann, J.S., & Young, M.E. (2007).  The feature positive effect in the face of variability:  Novelty as a feature. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 33, 72-77.

Castro, L., Young, M.E., & Wasserman, E.A. (2006).  Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior.   Memory and Cognition, 34, 1689-1703.

Peissig, J.J., Kirkpatrick, K., Young, M.E., Wasserman, E.A., & Biederman, I. (2006). The effects of varying stimulus size on object recognition in pigeons.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 32, 419-430.

Young, M.E., Beckmann, J.S., & Wasserman, E.A. (2006).  The pigeon’s perception of Michotte’s launching effect.  Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 86, 223-237.