M. Emrah Aktunç

I am a Lecturer in the Cognitive Science Department at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. My teaching and research interests lie in the intersections of cognitive psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy of science. 

My earlier work in psychological science was in human memory, more specifically, working memory (e.g., Gupta, Lipinski, Aktunc, 2005). I have also done research in the neuroscience of learning and memory at the graduate level. I did my doctoral work in the philosophy of cognitive science.

My dissertation was an application of the error-statistical approach to the cognitive sciences, specifically functional neuroimaging, and offered resolutions of several issues of evidence and inference in this field. In my dissertation, I also introduced and formulated a useful, or productive, kind of theory-ladenness focusing on experimental and methodological knowledge in fMRI research. Further development and expansion of my doctoral work can be seen in Aktunc (2014; 2021). 
 
My more recent empirical work in cognitive psychology was on inductive reasoning in which  I conducted a series of experiments employing different versions of Wason's rule discovery task expanded to include informal error rates and uncertainty reduction feedback (Aktunc et al., 2021). In another series of experiments, we explored the possibility of meaningful task-related interpretations long response times in this task.

Most recently, I have started a new series of experiments on symbolic cognition. In these experiments, I explore accuracy and response time differences in the processing of words and different types of symbols.