Garrison W. Cottrell was born at a very early age. Despite
starting life quite young, and being brought up by the
family collie, Tippy, who herded him around the backyard, he
managed to attend Woodstock. While he was not "influenced by
the Russians" at Cornell, as his mother believed, he did
spend a great deal of time protesting the war and had his
constitutional rights violated by the Nixon
administration. Upon graduation from Cornell University in
1972 with a double major in Mathematics and Sociology,
Cottrell was surprised to find that the revolution had not
occurred. Desperate for something to do, and unable to leave
Ithaca, he immediately enrolled in the Teaching Masters
program, and eventually obtained an MAT in Mathematics and a
permanent teaching certificate for high school math, grades
7-12 in New York State. After years of school bus driving,
ice cream scooping, and rough carpentry, he decided to
return to the Academy, eventually obtaining a Ph.D. in
Computer Science in 1985 from the University of Rochester
under James F. Allen. His thesis concerned a connectionist
model of word sense disambiguation that accounted for human
data on lexical access. He then became a Postdoctoral
Researcher with David E. Rumelhart at the Institute of
Cognitive Science at UCSD. His work at this time was on
image compression using back propagation. In 1987, he joined
the Computer Science and Engineering Department at UCSD. He
is currently the Director of the Interdisciplinary
Ph.D. Program in Cognitive Science at UCSD, as well as the
Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center, an NSF-sponsored
Science of Learning Center. He is also a founding member of
the Perceptual Expertise Network. Professor Cottrell's main
interest is Cognitive Science combined with a Computer
Science salary. With his students, he has built working
models of cognitive processes and used them to explain
psychological or neurological processes. In recent years, he
has focused upon visual salience, visual attention, and face
processing (including face recognition, face identification,
and facial expression recognition). He has also worked in
the areas of modeling psycholinguistic processes, such as
language acquisition, reading, and word sense
disambiguation. His most well-known work, however, is
probably in the area of Connectionist Dog Modeling, or
Dognitive Science, as well as his work on the Connectionist
Air Guitar. Many of these have been published in the Humour
(sic) section of the journal Connection Science.
