Event

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar: Laura Hiatt, "Cognitive Priming in Human and Autonomous Systems"

Friday, March 10, 2017
2:00 p.m.
2216 JMP
Ania Picard
301 405 4358
appicard@umd.edu

Lockheed Martin Robotics Seminar

Cognitive Priming in Human and Autonomous Systems

Laura Hiatt
Research Scientist
U.S. Naval Research Laboratory 

Host
Derek Paley 

Abstract
Priming is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon that helps to guide how people think, see and act. Priming is based on connections in the mind, where items or objects that are the focus of attention prime related items in memory, guiding one’s thoughts to be relevant and meaningful in the current situation. Here, we describe our approach to understanding and modeling cognitive priming, and show how it can explain human behavior on a variety of tasks, including similarity judgments and feature inference. Then, we show how cognitive priming can be leveraged to help autonomous systems likewise make sense of the world, demonstrating its benefits on tasks such as object recognition and goal selection. 

Biography
Dr. Laura Hiatt is a research scientist at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory. She received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Hiatt’s work has primarily focused on ways in which humans and robots can effectively work together as teammates. The research involves issues of planning and reasoning, human situational awareness, and team-based task communication strategies. Much of her work has also involved developing computational cognitive models of human cognition, and leveraging them to improve the ability of robots to team with humans and accomplish their tasks.