Dr. Michael Masson M.A. PhD.,
Associate Dean – Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Victoria

Scientists have studied the mind for decades and recent advances have revealed a number of surprising features of how it all works. Come down for a discussion of what thinking is, and discover the ways in which thought is not always what you think it is!

Cognitive Psychology's Greatest Hits:

Dr. Masson will present his personal list of what he considers to be some of the most compelling and interesting phenomena revealed by research in the field of cognitive psychology. A number of these findings will be illustrated through demonstrations involving audience participation.

Biography:

Dr. Masson obtained his Bachelor's degree at the University of British Columbia and received his PhD from the University of Colorado. After completing postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria in 1980. His research has been continuously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada since 1981. Has served as chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria and is currently Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. In 2018, Dr. Masson received the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science.

Dr. Masson's research has covered a broad range of topics in the field of cognitive psychology, including human memory, text comprehension, word identification processes, cognitive control, and the relation between cognition and action. Some of his work has been applied to practical problems such as how the use of plain language can influence the understanding of legal documents, the potential benefits of video-game playing on understanding principles of object motion, and the questionable claims of speed reading methods. Dr. Masson and his colleagues discovered a new visual motion illusion (the bicycle illusion) that inspired an Amsterdam-based alternative rock band to write a song about the discovery and investigation of the illusion. He also has helped to develop and elucidate useful statistical methods such as specialized confidence intervals and Bayesian analyses.