prospective students.
There are opportunities in the lab for undergraduates conducting a research thesis or as research assistants. We have zebrafish in the lab at the moment but studying other species of (small) freshwater fish is possible. We also have quail, garter snakes, and pythons. I am particularly interested in collective behavior but would be willing to supervise any reasonable project on animal cognition. Projects studying how social learning operates using fish or birds are also interesting to me. I am also happy to supervise theoretical (simulation) projects on various aspects of collective behavior (foraging, learning, evolution of group behavior). Please contact me to discuss if you are interested in joining the lab.
I am not currently accepting any new graduate students.
I am not currently accepting any new graduate students.
Teaching and playing.
This year (2019/20) I am teaching "Biopsychology" (PS263) and "Introduction to Learning" (PS261) in both the Fall and Winter terms.
In addition to classroom teaching, I am a big believer in the gamification of learning. In aid of this, I have created several online tools designed to help students engage with material related to what I most often teach. Links and brief descriptions below. Note that most of these things are evolving and may still contain a few bugs. Each website contains one or more help files that explain what they do and how to use them in much more detail than is given here.
Rescorla-Wagner Simulator: This is a simulator that allows you to design a learning experiment and see what the famous Rescorla-Wagner model predicts will happen in it. You can have multiple groups, training phases, and tests. The website generates graphs of associative strengths and bar charts of test results. You can save and load experiments. There are two versions of this site. One is a simplified version of the model (excluding β, for example) which I find useful for introductory classes. The second instantiates the full model (different values of βup and βdown, multiple reinforcers, varying reward contingencies...). Pre-loaded examples demonstrate blocking, overshadowing, the feature-positive effect (simple version), and relative validity (full version).
Build Your Own Brain (BYOB): This is a website that lets you build a simple neural network and see what it does. Networks can contain neurons, sensors (specialized neurons like rods, cones, or auditory hair cells), and muscles. You can add external stimuli that activate the sensors (such as lights and sounds) or drugs (that affect synapses) and label the parts of your network. Networks can then be 'run' to see how patterns of activation move through them. Networks can be saved and loaded and summarized in several ways. There are several pre-loaded examples: a reflex arc, a pacemaker, and a simple walking circuit.
Be the Pigeon: This is a game inspired by an in-class experiment that John Pearce used to conduct in which he had his students guess at the rule in an operant experiment and then compared their results to pigeons that had run the same experiment. This game presents a task to which you are not given the rules. The players' task is to play as well as possible, while also trying to figure out the rules governing the game - exactly the task faced by a pigeon in an operant box. The game generates a randomized rule for each new player. For various reasons, access to the game is limited to current students in my PS261 class. But please contact me if you want more information or a copy of the code for your own class.
links.
Wilfrid Laurier University home page
WLU Psychology home page
The Comparative Cognition Society
>3s. (Noam's blog about fish cognition)
WLU Psychology home page
The Comparative Cognition Society
>3s. (Noam's blog about fish cognition)
Media.
July 2015. Noam dicusses our research on Dave Brodbeck's "Spit and Twitches: The Animal Cognition Podcast". Here (Episode 4).
November 2015. An article in ALN (now called Laboratory Equipment) about zebrafish welfare with a (short) contribution by Noam [here] and a mini-profile [here].
July 2016. Our Banting Research Foundation Discovery Award is explained here.
August 2016. An article on the Laurier website highlighting our research [here].
February 2017. Video of a public lecture featuring recent Banting Discovery Award winners, including Noam, is here (Noam's talk starts at 41:47).
March 2019. Noam was part of a panel on TVO's "The Agenda", in an episode on "What animals think and feel". Watch it here.
July 2019. A video by ElevenX - who provided the sensors for our ongoing research at evolv1 - including interviews with Manuel Riemer, Simon Coulombe, and Noam. Here.
October 2019. Noam's public lecture in Waterloo, as part of the RCIScience series, is advertised here.
November 2015. An article in ALN (now called Laboratory Equipment) about zebrafish welfare with a (short) contribution by Noam [here] and a mini-profile [here].
July 2016. Our Banting Research Foundation Discovery Award is explained here.
August 2016. An article on the Laurier website highlighting our research [here].
February 2017. Video of a public lecture featuring recent Banting Discovery Award winners, including Noam, is here (Noam's talk starts at 41:47).
March 2019. Noam was part of a panel on TVO's "The Agenda", in an episode on "What animals think and feel". Watch it here.
July 2019. A video by ElevenX - who provided the sensors for our ongoing research at evolv1 - including interviews with Manuel Riemer, Simon Coulombe, and Noam. Here.
October 2019. Noam's public lecture in Waterloo, as part of the RCIScience series, is advertised here.
CODE.
A lot of our research involves the automated measurement of animal behavior. The more automated the better. To do this, we use a variety of programs that track animals in videos, control experiments, or clean up and analyze data. Some of the programs we use are available online. Many of them are written in-house and, since they might be useful to other people, I've collected them here for download, with brief explanations.