Ed Wasserman received his B.A. from UCLA and his Ph.D. from Indiana University. He’s held visiting appointments in England, Russia, Japan, and France. His research has investigated a critical question: namely, is there cognitive continuity between humans and animals or do humans possess unique cognitive mechanisms for adapting to the demands of survival? He’s studied the behavior of eight different species (chickens, pigeons, parrots, crows, rats, baboons, bonobos, and humans) using a variety of proven and novel tasks.

Leyre Castro received her Ph.D. from the University of Deusto (Bilbao, Spain). She began her research in experimental psychology studying the associative basis of causal learning in humans. She has published studies on causal learning, categorization, attention, same-different discrimination, memory, metacognition, unsupervised learning, figure-ground perception, task switching and cognitive flexibility, with both humans and pigeons. She is interested in the similarities and differences among species at behavioral, neural, and computational levels.

Francisca is a fourth-year graduate student in the Cognition Program. She is from Santiago, Chile and completed her B.S. in psychology at the Universidad de Chile. Her research interests are mostly focused in animal cognition and learning. Currently she's studying the effect that perceptual features have on relative numerical discriminations with pigeons. When she's not in the lab, she's at home annoying her cat, Dolores.

Odysseus is a fourth-year undergraduate majoring in Psychology (B.S.) and Trumpet Performance (B.A.). He joined the lab in February of 2020. During his free time, he enjoys listening to and playing music, playing video games, and spending time with his loved ones. On an ideal weekend, he loves grabbing a bite to eat at one of many restaurants in downtown Iowa City. Once he graduates, Odysseus hopes to continue his work in the field of cognition by pursuing a graduate degree at either Indiana University or the University of Iowa.

Hanlong is a senior at the University of Iowa pursuing a B.S. in Psychology with a minor in Chemistry on a Pre-Medical track. She has been working in the lab with a fellowship from the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates program since the summer of 2021. Hanlong’s research projects involve complex rule learning and implicit categorization in pigeons and humans.

Rey is a second-year neuroscience major at the University of Iowa. They joined the lab in the fall of 2022, and they currently have a fellowship from the Iowa Center for Research by Undergraduates program. In middle school, they saw a video about the psychology of emotion and they have been fascinated by the brain ever since. Rey is very excited about working with pigeons; now they know how smart pigeons are!  

Ananya is a native from Iowa City. She is currently an undergraduate student at the Oxford University in UK, and a collaborator in our lab during her vacation time. In her free time, in addition to contributing to science, she also enjoys playing classical piano and doing wildlife photography.

Victor is a postdoctoral research associate at Cardiff University, UK, developing mathematical models of Pavlovian conditioning that account for the acquisition and expression of reciprocal associations. A first-generation college student from Chile, he received his PhD in 2020, from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at The University of Iowa, under the mentorship of Dr Edward Wasserman. During his time at Iowa, Victor took a comparative approach to the study of decision-making, attentional processes, and categorization, using pigeons and human subjects, with a heavy emphasis on developing formal models for the explanation of these phenomena. Dogs or cats? Dogs. Favorite food? Spaghetti.

Ellen is a fifth-year graduate student interested in the roles that associative learning and declarative rule use play in categorization, as well as how associative mechanisms might serve as the foundation of various complex, "higher-order" processes. Currently, she is investigating how humans and pigeons solve rule-based and information-integration tasks.