Charles Doan

Assistant Professor of Psychology

Psychology & Human Service Stu, Office 125P 2337 Campus Box Elon, NC 27244

Professional Expertise

Cognitive psychology/science, categorization and concept learning, information acquisition, inferential reasoning

Brief Biography

Dr. Doan is an experimental psychologist focusing on connections between human conceptual behavior and other cognitive processes (perception, visual attention, reasoning, decision making). He uses well-validated and novel empirical paradigms to investigate how humans learn and acquire information from their environments, focusing particularly on the complexity of information that can be learned when we are not provided (immediate) feedback. Current research interests involve using eye-tracking technology to connect visual attention to working memory and conceptual processing, with an emphasis on applying the empirical paradigms to better understand cognitive components of clinical and health-related phenomena (ADHD and mTBI-related injuries).

News & Notes

Education

Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology, Ohio University

M.S. in Experimental Psychology, Ohio University

B.A. in Psychology w/Statistical Methods minor, Miami University

Employment History

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Elon University (2025-Present)

Associate Professor of Psychology (w/tenure), Marietta College (2023-2025)

Assistant Professor of Psychology, Marietta College (2018-2023)

Courses Taught

PSY 2300 - Cognitive Psychology (Fall 2025)

Publications

Doan, C.A., & Vigo, R. (2025). Constructing concepts without feedback: An empirical investigation of how relational information affects multidimensional concept completion behavior in an unsupervised task. PLoS One, 20(8), e0328368. (Open Access Article)

Vigo, R., Doan, C.A., Wimsatt, J., & Ross. C.B. (2023). A structure-sensitive alternative to Hick’s Law of choice reaction times: A mathematical and computational unification of conceptual complexity and choice behavior. Mathematics, 11(11), 2422. (Open Access Article)

Doan, C.A., & Vigo, R. (2023). A comparative investigation of integral- and separable-dimension stimulus-sorting behavior. Psychological Research, 87, 1917 – 1943. (Article)

Vigo, R., Doan, C.A., & Zhao, L. (2022). Classification of three-dimensional integral stimuli: Accounting for a replication and extension of Nosofsky and Palmeri (1996) with a dual discrimination invariance model. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 48(8), 1165 – 1192. (Article)

Vigo, R., Wimsatt, J., Doan, C.A., & Zeigler, D.E. (2022). Raising the bar for theories of categorization and concept learning: The need to resolve five basic paradigmatic tensions. Journal of Experimental & Theoretical Artificial Intelligence, 34(5), 845 – 869. (Article)

Vigo, R., Doan, C.A., Basawarj, & Zeigler, D.E. (2020). Context, structure, and informativeness judgments: An extensive empirical investigation. Memory & Cognition, 48(7), 1089 – 1111. (Article)

Doan, C.A. (2020). On unifying the mind through multimodal neural representations. Cognitive Systems Research, 59, 204 – 206.

Vigo, R., Doan, K.M., Doan, C.A., & Pinegar, S. (2018). On the learning difficulty of visual and auditory modal concepts: Evidence for a single processing system. Cognitive Processing, 19(1), 1 – 16. (Article)

Doan, C.A., & Vigo, R. (2016). Constructing and deconstructing concepts: On the nature of category modification and unsupervised sorting behavior. Experimental Psychology, 63(5), 249 – 262. (Article)

Vigo, R., & Doan, C.A. (2015). The structure of choice. Cognitive Systems Research, 36 – 37, 1 – 14. (Article)

Presentations

Recent Conference Presentations (**Denotes Student Researcher)

Doan, C.A., **Guilliams, R., **Mays, A., & Vigo, R. (April 2025). Believing is seeing: Relations between eye-tracking and uncertain feature inference. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association. The Palmer House: Chicago, IL.

Doan, C.A., & Vigo, R. (May 2024). Using the dual-discrimination invariance model to account for unsupervised categorization of separable and integral-dimension stimuli. Talk presented at the Midwestern Cognitive Science Conference. Ohio University: Athens, OH.

**Ross, C.B., Vigo, R., Doan, C.A., & Wimsatt, J. (May 2024). A friendly introduction to Generalized Invariance Structure Theory: A unified mathematical and computational theory of cognition and contextual information processing. Workshop presented at the Midwestern Cognitive Science Conference. Ohio University: Athens, OH.

Doan, C.A., **Mays, A., & **Mills, D. (March 2024). Eye-tracking behavior associated with unsupervised learning of integral-color categories. Poster presented at the Annual Meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association. Downtown Marriot: Philadelphia, PA.