Eduardo Mercado III

Eduardo Mercado III is a Professor of Psychology at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, where he is also Director of the Center for Cognitive Science. His scientific studies of neural and cognitive plasticity in humans and other animals seek to clarify how cortical networks constrain an individual’s ability to learn and generalize new concepts. Eduardo completed his Ph.D. in Psychology and M.S. in Electrical Engineering at the University of Hawaii in 1998, and postdoctoral training in computational neuroscience at Rutgers-Newark. His research has been supported by NSF, NIH, and Earthwatch. Eduardo has published extensively on the singing behavior of whales and the cognitive abilities of dolphins and children with autism spectrum disorder. He is a Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and of the American Psychological Society. Eduardo received the Frank A. Beach Comparative Psychology Award in 2021 from the American Psychological Association. Eduardo has strived to advance cognitive theory by quantifying behavior in novel ways and by collecting evidence that directly tests current assumptions about how minds work.