Ron Sun

Who is Ron Sun?

Ron Sun is a cognitive scientist and currently Professor of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and formerly the James C. Dowell Professor of Engineering and Professor of Computer Science at University of Missouri. He received his Ph.D in 1992 from Brandeis University.

His research interest centers around the study of cognition, especially in the areas of cognitive architectures, human reasoning and learning, cognitive social simulation, and hybrid connectionist-symbolic models. Over the years, his work has been wide-ranging, and spans cognitive science, psychology, philosophy, computer science, artificial intelligence, and social sciences.

For his paper on integrating rule-based and connectionist models for accounting for human everyday reasoning, he received the 1991 David Marr Award from Cognitive Science Society. For his work on human skill learning, he received the 2008 Hebb Award from the International Neural Network Society.

Throughout the past two decades, he has been conducting research in the fields of psychology of learning and hybrid neural network. Specifically, he has worked on the integrated effect of "top-down" and "bottom-up" learning in human skill acquisition, in a variety of task domains, for example, navigation tasks, reasoning tasks, and implicit learning tasks. This inclusion of bottom-up learning processes has been revolutionary in cognitive psychology, because most previous models of learning had focused exclusively on top-down learning. This research has culminated with the development of an integrated cognitive architecture that can be used to provide a qualitative and quantitative explanation of empirical psychological learning data. The model, CLARION, is a hybrid neural network that can be used to simulate problem solving and social interactions as well. More importantly, CLARION was the first psychological model that proposed an explanation for the “bottom-up learning” mechanisms present in human skill acquisition: His numerous papers on the subject have brought attention to this neglected area in cognitive psychology.