Cooper studies human brain, Libertarian philosophy

Amani Ismail

An unconventional professor, Eric Cooper is a 33-year-old Libertarian whose passions include video games and opera.

Cooper, assistant professor of psychology, came to Iowa State in 1994, one year after receiving his Ph.D. in experimental psychology from the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis.

Cooper identified cognitive psychology as a synonym for experimental psychology and defined it as the study of how information is processed by the human brain.

More specifically, he studies object recognition. This, he said, is “how you can look at a visual pattern … and determine what it is.”

As chairman of the psychology and linguistics division of the Iowa Academy of Sciences, Cooper said his research includes studying the functioning of the human brain’s two hemispheres.

Language, he said, is better recognized by the left hemisphere, while faces are better recognized by the right one. For example, Cooper said he recently received a telephone call from Time magazine confirming that reader observation of words and faces does, in fact, support this idea.

Cooper, who received the ISU College of Liberal Arts and Sciences Award for Early Excellence in Teaching in 1998, described his interaction with undergraduates in class as “great.”

“It’s nice when you’re working with people who are just about to start their professional life,” he said.

Cooper said although the material he introduces is usually novel to the students, he sees positive reactions.

“A lot of them have great enthusiasm for the topic,” he said.

Cooper has taught Psychology 301, research design and methodology, and Psychology 312, sensation and perception.

Besides enjoying teaching, Cooper praised the unique opportunities his research offers him.

“Any question that interests me I can pursue, and that’s great,” he said. “I can do whatever I want.”

Although dealing simultaneously with teaching and research, Cooper said it is actually through teaching that he derives his greatest satisfaction at Iowa State.

“It’s more immediate,” he said. “I get the feedback right there from the students.”

However, there’s a subject that Cooper feels passionate about in a negative way: the current state of politics in the Democratic and Republican Parties.

In fact, Cooper said he would not vote for a non-Libertarian candidate.

“[Libertarianism] falls from the philosophy that one person may not initiate force against another person or their property,” he said.

Even though Cooper said he holds firmly onto his political beliefs, he said he does not share them very often with others on this campus.

“I try to keep my politics low-key around here because they’re not very popular,” he said.

Meanwhile, Cooper said he is busy with research aimed at limiting the distance of pig feces from residential areas in Iowa.

The National Pork Producers Council has given Cooper and his fellow researchers a $24,000 grant to identify the chemicals in pig feces that cause the undesirable odors.

The ultimate goal of the grant, he said, is for such feces to be located at a reasonably far distance from residential areas that have complaints about overwhelming odors.

Cooper said he aspires to continue teaching and researching psychology until he retires.

“I still think there are big questions to be answered in psychology,” he said.