Southern Illinois University

Michael Young
Professor

Dr. Michael Young received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Minnesota/Twin Cities in 1995. He began his career as a computer scientist out of the University of Illinois in 1984 with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence.

Dr. Young's primary research program involves the study of decision making in dynamic environments. He is currently studying (a) the variables that influence the identification of causes in continuously unfolding environments and (b) the situational and individual variables related to impulsive and risky choice in video game environments. He continues to integrate his background in computer science with his interest in psychology through the development of computational models of environment-behavior relations. Dr. Young's love of mathematics also is revealed by his occasional side project evaluating various statistical and design methods using Monte Carlo simulation.

For more information, go to Dr. Young's personal web page.

Selected Recent Publications

Castro, L., Wasserman, E.A, & Young, M.E. (in press). Variations on variability: Effects of display composition on same-different discrimination in pigeons. Learning and Behavior.

Young, M.E., Cole, J. J., & Sutherland, S.C. (2012). Rich stimulus sampling for between-subjects designs improves model selection. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 176-188.

Young, M.E. (2012). Contemporary thought on the environmental cues that determine causal decisions. To appear in T.R. Zentall & E.A. Wasserman (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Comparative Cognition (pp. 141-156). New York: Oxford University Press.

Young, M.E., & Cole, J.J. (2012). Human sensitivity to the magnitude and probability of a continuous causal relation in a video game. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Animal Behavior Processes, 38, 11-22.

Young, M.E., Webb, T.L., & Jacobs, E.A. (2011). Deciding when to "cash in" when outcomes are continuously improving. Behavioural Processes, 88, 101-110.

Racey, D.E., Young, M.E., Garlick, D., Pham, J.N., & Blaisdell, A. (2011). Pigeon and human performance in a multi-armed bandit task in response to changes in variable interval schedules. Learning and Behavior, 39, 245-258.

Limongi Tirado, R., & Young, M.E. (2011). Language-driven spatiotemporal causal integration in the prefrontal and premotor cortices. Revista de Linguistica Teorica y Aplicada (Journal of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics), 49, 13-27.

Young, M.E., Sutherland, S.C., Cole, J.J., & Nguyen, N. (2011). Waiting to decide helps in the face of probabilistic uncertainty but not delay uncertainty. Learning and Behavior, 39, 115-124.