Southern Illinois University Carbondale

	Michael Young
Degree	Ph.D., University of Minnesota
Position	Professor, Brain and Cognitive Science
Office	271-F, Life Sciences II
Phone	(618) 453-3567
Fax	(618) 453-3563
Email	meyoung@siu.edu
Biosketch	Michael E. Young (Ph.D. 1995, Experimental Psychology, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities). Dr. Young is a cognitive psychologist in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences program in the Department of Psychology at SIUC. He teaches courses on research methods, computational modeling, and cognitive psychology. Research conducted in his laboratory spans a considerable range of interest in cognitive psychology. Recent work includes a) identifying and modeling the processes that underlie how people learn to predict future events, b) understanding people's abilities and limitations in learning about multiple causation and interactions among causes with an eye toward exploring interventions to improve accurate causal inference, c) investigating the judgment processes involved in identifying causal relationships, and d) identifying the variables that influence human's and other species' ability to determine the amount of variability present in the world. Dr. Young is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association (Division 3, Experimental Psychology). For more information, see Dr. Young's personal web page http:www.psychology.siu.edu/bcs/young.html.
Research Interests	Cognitive Psychology Prediction Judgment and Decision Making
Selected Publications	Recent Journal Articles & Book Chapters: Nikonova, O., & Young, M.E. (in press). The impact of perceived animacy on causal judgments. American Journal of Psychology. Young, M.E., Wasserman, E.A., & Ellefson, M.R. (in press). A theory of variability discrimination. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. Young, M.E. , & Nikonova, O. (in press). Color change as a causal agent: Revisited. American Journal of Psychology. Castro, L., Young, M.E., & Wasserman, E.A. (in press). Effects of number of items and visual display variability on same-different discrimination behavior. Memory and Cognition. 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. 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.
Teaching	Undergraduate Psychology Courses: Research Methods and Statistics (Psyc 211) Judgment and Decision-making (Psyc 471) Graduate Courses: Computational Modeling (Psyc 575)