Ken Sobel
Ken Sobel
Professor of Psychology
MAS 260
(501) 450-5440
Getting to Know Dr. Sobel:
Introduction:
I grew up in Pittsburgh, PA, but never liked cold weather so I headed south to get my Ph.D. in Nashville, and to Arkansas where I can ride my bicycle to work wearing shorts all year long. I got my Ph.D. in cognitive science from Vanderbilt, and did a postdoc researching visual ambiguity at Vanderbilt and another postdoc researching working memory at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. Because I didn’t study psychology as an undergraduate student, I’m pretty sure I got into Vandy’s Ph.D. program because of a masters degree in philosophy from the University of Wyoming and a masters degree in information science from the University of Pittsburgh. My advisor at Vandy picked me to work with him because he wanted someone who could help him with his computer model of visual attention, and he fancied himself a philosopher, so there you go.
What year did you start working in the department?
2005.
What classes do you regularly teach?
Sensation and Perception, Cognitive Psychology, Physiological Psychology, and Apprenticeship.
Do you have any hobbies, interests, or unique facts you would like to share?
I dig biking and swimming and reading books about neuroscience and math and physics and language. I love to visit Italy, and hope to go there at least once each year until I die.
What are your scholarly and/or applied interests?
For the last ten years or so I’ve been looking at how vision and cognition interact, like how a number that is numerically large (like a 9 rather than a 2) and physically large (i.e., a large font size) is easier to find from among other numbers than when the target’s numerical and physical size are incongruent (e.g., a 2 written in a large font or 9 in small font).
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