The Center for Computational Psychology (CCP) was initially formed in 1994 to provide an intellectual focus for researchers in the University of Chicago Psychology who are interested in developing and testing computational models of psychological processes. A increasing number of researchers in the Department of Psychology have been working on computational models of visual perception, speech perception, language understanding and development, categorization, conceptual representation, judgment and decision making, song production and perception in birds, and hormonal cycles. The Center was formed to provide an intellectual focus on understanding what can be learned from computational models of psychology.
As this interest has grown, there has been a concomitant increase in providing students with experience in the process of developing these computational models. Thus the CCP has also become a locus for supporting the use of computers in psychology instruction and research.
Currently the CCP provides the computational infrastructure support for faculty and students interested in using computers in their psychology courses to explore computational models, computational methods of data analysis, stimulus analysis, preparation, and demonstrations of psychological phenomena.
The CCP is comprised of a fileserver with 140 GB capacity, two Ultra 60s, two Linux commodity servers, as well as an online backup filesystem residing on a Linux rsync server. The cluster is made up of two independent and identical nodes each comprising of one Ultra 60 and one Linux commodity server. The cluster utilizes round-robin DNS with fail-over between the two nodes. All servers are connected to the university's network at 100 Mbps as well as having an independent connection to each other over a private 1000 Mbps network.
The CCP supports two teaching laboratories. One is a laboratory of UNIX systems connected to CCP, for connectionist, AI, and ALife modeling, digital signal processing, and sophisticated statistical analysis methods. The other is a laboratory of networked G3, G4, NT, Sun Blade 100, and SGI workstations connected to the CCP Cluster which provides the facilities for real-time data collection to test computational models and explore psychological phenomena using actual research tools or actual tools scaled down to a classroom level.
The CCP also provides various software applications for statistical analysis, agent simulation, and tool development. There are also a number of research applications developed for specific psychology research areas such as linguistics.