Support for Colby’s Academic Mission
The income from unrestricted endowment supports Colby's academic mission by allowing the College to attract first-rate faculty and to purchase state-of-the-art research equipment. The departments of Psychology and Computer Science have been reinvigorated with the addition of new faculty members and new approaches to teaching their disciplines and are exploring ways to support each other’s curricula. One of the goals of the current Reaching the World campaign is the construction of a new facility to house the natural sciences, and these two departments are expected to benefit from the expansion of much-needed laboratory facilities.

The Psychology Department
Over the past four years, the Psychology Department has hired four new faculty members, including current department chair Thane Pittman, and a search for two more is in progress. All of these newly-filled positions are tenure-track, which has allowed the College to attract top-rate candidates for the posts.

The psychology curriculum has been completely revamped to focus on the discipline's empirical nature, and student research projects are now critical components for the major. By the end of their sophomore year, psychology majors, under faculty supervision, will have learned how to design experiments, conduct individual and group research, analyze data, write papers, and present their findings. Starting with the Class of 2009, every psychology major must take a one-year sequence of research methods and statistics and complete at least two original research projects. In their sophomore and junior years, students design and carry out a research project that will address an as-yet unanswered question. They present the results of their research projects at a Spring Colloquium.

This new curriculum requires juniors to take seminar/collaborative research pairs of courses (see enclosed chart). In their senior year, students can take another pair of course, perform individual research, or devise an independent study. The best students are invited to conduct year-long honors research projects.

The final change to the curriculum, beginning with the Class of 2009, will be capstone senior integrative seminars. The seminars will be built around the Colloquium lecture series that brings in faculty from around the world. Invited speakers will send papers for the students to read before the speaker’s arrival. The students will meet the speaker and, during a seminar, will lead the discussion about their research topics and make connections with all they have learned during their studies at Colby. Each student ends this course by writing an integrative culminating paper.

Psi Chi, the national honor society for psychology, named Stacey Dubois '08 the winner of this year’s national competition for the J.P. Guilford Undergraduate Research Award. A senior psychology major from Caribou, Maine, Stacey completed her research project, titled “Stereotype Threat Affects False Memory Susceptibility in Younger and Older Adults,” in her junior year.

All psychology faculty members integrate their own scholarship with their teaching by employing student laboratory research assistants during the academic year. This gives students the opportunity to work one-on-one with a faculty member outside of the classroom. For some research projects, such as those dealing with aging or infant cognition, the department recruits volunteer subjects from the central Maine community.

Research on infant development using eye tracking equipment.

Analyzing the brain wave activity in a 6-month-old infant.

The curriculum revision has opened up to every psychology major the possibility of attending graduate school, and the department facilitates meetings and contacts with graduate psychology programs. Colby psychology majors are now pursuing graduate degrees in some of the finest programs in the country, including those at Stanford, Columbia, and Princeton.

Recent equipment purchases, partially funded by income from unrestricted endowment:

• Eye tracker for tracking, recording, and analyzing where people are looking (fine level of detail) while processing visual stimuli, $20,000
• EEG/ERP (electroencephalography/evoked response potential) system for monitoring, recording, and analyzing brain wave activity in infants and adults, $60,000
• Water maze for testing animals' (rats) spatial learning abilities under a variety of conditions, includes automatic computer-controlled movement-tracking and recording equipment (software, cameras, and computer hardware as well as the maze itself), $10,000
• Cage system for new animal (rat) colony, $15,000
• Video monitoring and recording system with remote camera control and split-screen observation technology for emotion and social psychology research, $15,000
• Electrophysiology recording and analysis (blood pressure, heart rate, breathing rate, galvanic skin response) hardware and software for emotion research, $25,000
• Goniometers (hardware including telemetry devices, computers, and software for tracking physical limb motion) for studies of human movement dynamics, $30,000

The Department of Computer Science
Until 1998, Computer Science was part of the Mathematics Department at Colby. The courses available then focused on using computer technology to solve mathematical problems and did not emphasize interaction with other disciplines. The dot.com bust produced the false impression that there would be fewer jobs for computer science majors, and the department saw a drop in enrollment. However, there is now a resurgence of interest in computer science as students recognize the need for knowledge about information technology in many career fields.

This year Bruce Maxwell was hired as chair of the Computer Science Department, and he is taking a fresh look at how the department functions. Holding degrees in several disciplines himself, he promotes computer science at Colby as an integrative department that supports and enhances many other academic disciplines. Professor Maxwell’s vision is to devise a curriculum that provides students with the fundamentals of the field and with depth in at least one area, that supports faculty research, and that can be taught successfully by a faculty of three. He wants to loosen the departments elective requirements but add the requirement that students take a fall/spring sequence that includes a research project. The department is also implementing a longer introductory sequence of courses and adding an introductory course in data analysis and visualization. The data analysis course, which looks at how to discover and characterize patterns in data, is aimed at natural science and psychology majors as part of a newly-designed Computer Science minor. Beginning with the spring semester in 2008, Maxwell hopes to initiate a cognitive-science reading group with faculty members from other departments, which would meet monthly.

Computer science is also a lab science that can leverage knowledge and expand the speed of data analysis. Computers make it possible to collect so much data that it can be hard to see emerging relationships, and the Computer Science Department can help students in other disciplines analyze their research data. For example, an introductory course in computer science is one of several courses that satisfy a requirement in biology.

The Department of Computer Science is working especially closely with the Department of Psychology. An area of particular interest to both is the interface between robotics and psychology—how people relate to robots and how robots can be programmed to better interact with people.

 Currently, paid student researchers Brian Putnam ’08 of Jeffersonville, Vermont, and Andrew Cherne ’09 of Minneapolis, Minnesota, are helping to write programs for Colby’s robots. The large red ATRV robot with wheels (dubbed Galadriel) is being programmed to synthesize speech and to use a laser to sense the distance of objects. This robot will be tested as a Colby tour guide. Maxwell was able to purchase it for Colby at less than half its retail price because he helped the manufacturer design boards to repair other small robots. The smaller round robot on the left is one of three “social” robots that Maxwell brought with him to Colby.

In 1999 Maxwell and his students won a small robot (Gollum) in a competition at the American Association for Artificial Intelligence. The following year, they won Sam and Frodo at the same competition. Gollum has won an urban search-and-rescue competition, and the other two won a competition in which they served hors d’oeuvres.

The Department of Computer Science has submitted a grant proposal for the Cyber Infrastructure Program. The grant would allow biology students at Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, to conduct experiments in the Maine woods, through an Internet connection, using Colby’s robots and computer programming.

To keep up with news from both of these departments, we invite you to browse their Web pages at www.colby/psychology/ and www.cs.colby.edu.