Dr Irina Baetu
Room 514 Hughes Building |
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Area of Research
Associative learning
Awards
Post-Doctoral Fellowship (Fonds Québécois de la Recherche sur la Nature et les Technologies, 2010-2012) held at the University of Cambridge.
New Investigator Award (American Psychological Association Division of Experimental Psychology, 2009) for “Human judgments of positive and negative causal chains”, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 153-168.
Postgraduate Scholarship (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, 2006-2009) held at McGill University.
McGill Major Fellowship (McGill University, 2005-2006).
Psychology Research Interests
I study how people detect causal relationships in their environment, which allows them to predict future outcomes and plan their actions. I am interested in discovering plausible mechanisms by which the brain can infer and represent the relationship between causes and effects. To do so, I use associative and connectionist models that are inspired by some characteristics of the nervous system to simulate existing data on learning phenomena and generate novel, testable, predictions. I am particularly interested in models that represent stimuli in real time. Events unfold in real time and people and other animals are able to learn both correlations and temporal relationships. For instance, they can learn to predict a series of events that occur in succession. Models that address both learning of covariation and temporal relationships might be able to provide a more complete account of how people and animals process events in real time.
I use behavioural and eye-tracking measures to study how people detect statistical regularities in their environment. My research involves computer-based tasks in which participants learn predictive relationships between various stimuli. I also recently used eye-tracking technology to investigate how people learn to predict the future location, or non-location of a visual target from a cue stimulus. The goal of this project was to study how learning influences visual search.
Recent Key Publications
Baetu, I., & Baker, A.G. (2010). Extinction and blocking of conditioned inhibition in human causal learning. Learning & Behavior, 38, 394-407.
Baetu, I., & Shultz, T.R. (2010). Development of prototype abstraction and exemplar memorization. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 814-819). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
Baetu, I., & Baker, A.G. (2009). Human judgments of positive and negative causal chains. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 153-168.
Darredeau, C., Baetu, I., Baker, A.G., & Murphy, R.A., (2009). Competition between multiple causes of a single outcome in causal reasoning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 35, 1-14.
Baetu, I., Baker, A.G., Darredeau, C. & Murphy, R.A. (2005). A comparative approach to cue competition with one and two strong predictors. Learning & Behavior, 33, 160-171.