Vimal Rao, PhD student in the quantitative methods in education program in the Department of Educational Psychology; Jeffrey Bye, lecturer in the psychological foundations of education program; and Sashank Varma, formerly a professor in the psychological foundations of education program now at Georgia Tech, have been awarded a Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award by the Cognitive Science Society. The trio are receiving the honor for their paper, “Categorical perception of p-values.”

According to CSS, the Disciplinary Diversity & Integration Award recognizes the best cognitive science research in disciplines that have been traditionally under-represented at its annual conferences and journals. All submissions must include interdisciplinary perspectives and integrative approaches to understanding the human mind. 

Rao first began researching while taking a psychological foundations of education seminar on mathematical cognition from Dr. Varma. He saw how research on how people represent and reason about number could inform current debates about the reproducibility of scientific experiments, and ultimately guide how we teach students about probability and statistical inference.

“I look forward to future research collaborations at the intersection of cognitive science and statistics education,” Rao says.