Eduardo Mercado III
PhD
Professor
Cognitive Area Head
Director
Research Interests
Animal Cognition; Vocal Behavior of Vertebrates; Learning and Plasticity
Education
- PhD, University of Hawaii
Current Research
My research focuses on how different brain systems interact to construct representations of experienced events, and how these representations change over time. My approach is integrative and comparative. I am currently using techniques from the fields of experimental psychology, computational neuroscience, electrical engineering, and behavioral neuroscience to answer questions about auditory learning, memory, and behavior in humans and other animals.
I’m currently supervising graduate students in the Cognitive Psychology, Behavioral Neuroscience, and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior doctoral programs. These students are pursuing research related to change deafness, dog cognition, musical skills, and humpback whale bioacoustics. I’m also currently developing research projects related to high-resolution behavioral analyses, long-term monitoring of nervous system activity, and computational models of cortical plasticity in children with autism spectrum disorders.
Selected Publications
- Mercado, E, III. (2018). The sonar model for humpback whale song revised. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1156.
- Wisniewski, M. G., Radell, M. L., Church, B.A., & Mercado, E., III (2017). Benefits of fading in perceptual learning are driven by more than dimensional attention. PLoS One, 12, e0180959.
- Mercado, E., III, Wisniewski, M. G., McIntosh, B., Guillette, L., Hahn, A. H., Sturdy, C. B. (2017). Chickadee songs provide hidden clues to singers’ locations. Animal Behavior & Cognition, 4, 301-313.
- Mercado, E., III, & Sturdy, C. B. (2017). Classifying animal sounds with neural networks. In C. Brown & T. Riede (Eds.) Comparative bioacoustics: An overview (pp. 415-461). Bentham Science.
- Orduña, V., & Mercado, E., III (2017). Impulsivity in spontaneously hypertensive rats: Within-subjects comparison of sensitivity to delay and to amount of reinforcement. Behavioural Brain Research, 328, 178-185.
- Gluck, M.A., Mercado, E., & Myers, C.M. (2016). Learning and memory: From brain to behavior, Third Edition. New York: Worth Publishers.
- Mercado, E., III, & Church, B. A. (2016). Simulations suggest heterogeneous category learning and generalization in children with autism is a result of idiosyncratic perceptual transformations. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. 46, 2806-2812.
- Mercado, E., III. (2015). Neural and cognitive plasticity. Emerging trends in the behavioral and social sciences: An interdisciplinary, searchable, and linkable resource, 1-13. doi: 10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0236.
- Mercado, E., III. (2014). Relating cortical wave dynamics to learning and remembering. AIMS Neuroscience, 1, 185-209. doi: 10.3934/Neuroscience.2014.3.185
- Church, B.A., Mercado, E., III, Wisniewski, M. G., & Liu, E. H. (2013). Temporal dynamics in auditory perceptual learning: Impact of sequencing and incidental learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 132, 270-276.
- Mercado, E, III, & Henderson, C. M. (2012). Neurally inspired models of psychological processes. In R. J. Nelson & S. Mizumori (Eds.) Handbook of psychology: Volume 3 Behavioral neuroscience (pp. 620-642). Hoboken, NJ: Wiley.
- Wisniewski, M. G., Mercado, E., III, Gramann, K., & Makeig, S. (2012). Familiarity with speech affects cortical processing of auditory distance cues and increases acuity. PLoS ONE, 7, e41025.
- Orduña, I., Liu, E., H.-M., Church, B. A., Eddins, A. C., & Mercado, E., III. (2012). Evoked-potential changes following discrimination learning involving complex sounds. Clinical Neurophysiology, 123, 711-719.
- Mercado, E., III (2009). Cognitive plasticity and cortical modules. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 18, 153-158.