Johns Hopkins University, Department of Neuroscience
 

 

 

 

Michael  McCloskey, Ph.D.

Professor of Cognitive Science

Telephone Number:   410-516-5325

Fax Number:   410-516-8020

Johns Hopkins University

Department of Cognitive Sciences

3400 N. Charles St.

Baltimore, MD 21218

Room: 147C Krieger Hall

michael.mccloskey@jhu.edu

Cognitive Neuropsychology

    
    

     My research focuses on issues of mental representation and computation in the areas of spatial cognition and lexical processing. I study cognitive deficits in children and adults with brain damage or learning disabilities, with the aim of gaining insight into normal cognitive representations and processes, how these are instantiated in the brain, and how they are disrupted when the brain is damaged or fails to develop normally. For example, an extensive study of a college student with a remarkable impairment in perceiving the locations and orientations of visual stimuli (despite normal visual acuity) has led to conclusions about the nature of spatial representations in the normal visual system (McCloskey et al., 1995; McCloskey & Palmer, 1996; McCloskey & Rapp, 2000a, 2000b). In other research involving brain-damaged patients with impairments in writing, patterns of impaired performance provide grounds for conclusions about the forms of mental representation underlying lexical processing, and the computations carried out over these representations (e.g., McCloskey et al., 1994).

     Finally, I am interested in foundational issues in cognitive science, including the rationale for adopting a representational/computational conception of the mind, the relationship between cognitive science and neuroscience, the fundamental distinctions between connectionist and symbolic frameworks, and the role of simulation in cognitive science (e.g., McCloskey, 1991).

 
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