Research:

Research within the IGERT Program at Michigan State is focused on the following general question: How do organisms, including humans, combine information from the environment with information in memory to decide upon a course of action at the current moment that will lead to a desirable outcome some time in the future? How can machines, including mobile robots, be endowed with similar capabilities?

Here are some examples of the diverse kinds of questions faculty and graduate students in the IGERT program at Michigan State are trying to answer:

• How do honey bees find their way home to the hive from a food source that many be hundreds of meters away?
• How can robots be designed so that they can learn to navigate their way through complex natural environments?
• How do people quickly and effortlessly direct their eyes to important sources of information in the visual environment?
• Can an artificial vision system be built that actively directs its sensors toward the information it needs to successfully find a specific object in a cluttered scene?
• What processes allow humans to switch back and forth rapidly between complex tasks without becoming confused?
• How do people understand and produce language in real time?
• How much of the world that we experience do we store in memory, and how much of that memory do we use when we make fast behavioral decisions?
• How do humans and animals decide when to gather more information before committing to a risky decision?