Hi, I’m Can (pronounced like ‘John’). I am a postdoctoral researcher at Université du Québec à Montréal, where I work with Prof. Henry Markovits, and incoming Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychology and University College (Cognitive Science) at the University of Toronto. I completed my PhD at the Department of Cognitive Science at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I worked with Prof. Ron Sun and I obtained a Master of Cognitive Science from Carleton University under Prof. Jim Davies.

My research broadly focuses on cognitive architectures, cognitive modeling, and artificial intelligence. I am interested in simulating mental processes and using formal systems to better understand how the mind works. I am the creator and maintainer of pyClarion, an open source Python library for the Clarion cognitive architecture. The main line of my current work is rooted in developing an integrative understanding of human response processes in psychometric cognitive ability tests and other cognitive tasks. The motivation for such work includes better understanding human reasoning processes, improving and refining the design and interpretation of psychometric ability tests, and developing more versatile and transparent (artificial) cognitive systems.

Selected Publications

Mekik, C. S. and Galang, C. M (2022). Cognitive Science in a Nutshell. Cognitive Science, 46(8), e13179.

Mekik, C. (2021). Logic Programs as Executable Experimental Task Specifications. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 43.

Mekik, C.; Sun, R.; and Dai, D. Y. (2018) Similarity-Based Reasoning, Raven’s Matrices, and General Intelligence. In Jérôme Lang (Ed.), Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-2018; 1576–1582).