Ph.D., Cognitive Psychology, Princeton University, 1978
Professor of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University
Joint appointments: Department of Psychology, Zanvyl Krieger Mind/Brain Institute
Cognitive neuropsychology, spatial and lexical representation, foundations of cognitive science
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, in press a, in press b). 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).
McCloskey, M., & Rapp, B. (in press a) Attention-referenced visual representations: Evidence from impaired visual localization. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance.
McCloskey, M., & Rapp, B. (in press b). A visually-based developmental reading deficit. Journal of Memory and Language.
McCloskey, M., Rapp, B., Yantis, S., Rubin, G., Bacon, W. F., Dagnelie, G., Gordon, B., Aliminosa, D., Boatman, D. F., Badecker, W., Johnson, D. N., Tusa, R. J., & Palmer, E. (1995). A developmental deficit in localizing objects from vision. Psychological Science, 6, 112-117.
McCloskey, M., & Palmer, E. (1996). Visual representation of object location: Insights from localization impairments. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5, 25-28.
McCloskey, M., Badecker, W., Goodman-Schulman, R. A., & Aliminosa, D. (1994). The structure of graphemic representations in spelling: Evidence from a case of acquired dysgraphia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 11, 341-392.
McCloskey, M. (1991). Networks and theories: The place of connectionism in cognitive science. Psychological Science, 2, 387-395.
How to Contact Me
email: michael.mccloskey@jhu.edu
phone: 410-516-5325
fax: 410-516-8020
mail: Department of Cognitive Science
Krieger Hall
Johns Hopkins University
Baltimore, MD 21218