Joshua James New
I am an assistant professor in the Psychology Department at Barnard College where I run the Evolutionary Cognition Laboratory and instruct courses in evolutionary, cognitive, and introductory psychology. I completed my graduate training in psychology at the University of California Santa at Barbara, supervised by Leda Cosmides and John Tooby. I then completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the Yale Perception and Cognition Laboratory – working with Brian Scholl and supported by an individual National Research Service Award from NIMH.
The enduring fascination that drives my research program is how our inner experiences – both the perceptually immediate and cognitively reflective – are constructions of psychological processes uniquely tailored over evolutionary time to meet the needs of our species. This has attracted me to the study of subjects such as visual attention and awareness, spatial cognition, and time perception – processes which provide an apparently seamless experience of the real world, but not one that is wholly veridical, uniform, or complete. The evolutionary perspective has guided my discoveries of how the internal representations produced by our perceptual, spatial, and temporal processes are inherently attuned for specific adaptive goals – prioritizing, amplifying, and even suppressing our internal experiences of objects and events according to their impact on human survival and fitness over sufficient evolutionary time.