Episodic memory provides a means by which we are able to reflect on the past, make decisions about the future, and form a learned identity. Even subtle changes to our memory can have a detrimental impact on our daily lives. Memory declines as we age, and clinically salient impairment is...
Metaphor is an important and pervasive phenomenon in language and cognition. The vast majority of psycholinguistic research on metaphor has focused on noun metaphors (e.g., That surgeon is a butcher; That lawyer is a shark), while relatively little has investigated the processing of verb metaphors (e.g., The car limped down...
Dynamic decision-making is a complex process that relies on our ability to generate, evaluate and implement a variety of strategies. Understanding how people navigate this process is a difficult problem that requires a wide range of methodologies. This study details a combination of behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and neuroimaging that...
People are exposed to inaccurate claims and ideas every day, from sources intended to inform, entertain, or do both. A large body of research has demonstrated that exposure to inaccurate statements, even when conveying obviously false ideas, can affect people’s subsequent judgments. Contemporary accounts suggest that these effects may be...
Humans are prodigious learners. One of our most powerful learning tools is the ability to detect and transfer relational similarities between items and events, despite their perceptual differences. Previous research has found that the roots of this ability extend into infancy. As early as three months of age, infants can...
Emotion perception is multisensory and involves decoding and integrating input from both visual and auditory modalities. This dissertation investigates the influence of cultural and linguistic experience on multisensory perception of emotion. Experiment 1 examines the effect of cultural background on modality bias (i.e., the amount of influence a modality exerts...
Language is a hallmark of human cognition—a rich and flexible method of representing the world around us. As such, language provides an invaluable resource to human infants: a way of gaining insight into the representations that guide adult cognition. In this dissertation, I explore how language influences infants’ cognition as...
In shared workspaces users have real-time access to others’ actions, allowing greater access to potentially informative cues. However, there has been little exploration about what impact the ability to view each other’s work in real time has on group members’ perception of both each other and their understanding of the...
Background: The way in which one perceives their visual world (i.e., bottom-up visual perception) and what one pays attention to in their surroundings (i.e., top-down attention), are critical to uncovering underlying thoughts and cognitions, and impact how one operates in the social world. Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD), a...
Visual processing often requires the coordination of different neurophysiological regions in the visual system to independently represent and then re-integrate the different features of an object to gain an accurate and coherent representation of that object. Yet, under certain circumstances, this process can go awry and result in illusory misbindings,...
Phonotactic patterns are generalizations that govern the order of consonants and vowels, within words and syllables. Certain second-order phonotactic patterns—those that relate multiple sounds within a syllable, such as “if the vowel is [ɪ], then [s] can only appear at the end of the syllable”—require a period of sleep-based consolidation...
Algorithmically-driven social platforms present a challenge for self-presentation and identity management by obscuring audiences behind algorithmic mechanisms. Users are increasingly aware of this and actively adapting through folk theorization, but we do not know how users are coping with the constant change endemic to these platforms. We also do not...
Western scientific norms (e.g., Bacon, 1623/2005) dictate that mechanistic explanations like “rain falls because clouds form water vapor” are preferable to teleological ones like “rain falls so that plants should grow. Do people have preferences that naturally align with this? The predominant interpretation of past research is that they do...
Breast cancer patients have reported nonspecific neurologic symptoms such as fatigue, depression, and cognitive concerns while undergoing adjuvant therapy. Few neuroimaging studies have examined hormone therapy, an adjuvant therapy, and more research is needed to determine possible neurologic and cognitive effects. Previous estrogen research has found alterations in gray matter...
Over the past decade the market for children’s digital play activities focused on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) has grown exponentially. One benefit to the growth in digital STEM play is that it can provide children opportunities to engage the cognitive skills and practices that can be valuable for...
Research over the past several decades has revealed that memory reactivation in sleep contributes to the formation of long-lasting memories. Among the most recent developments in this field is the widespread use of the technique of targeted memory reactivation (TMR), which allows researchers to induce reactivation of specific memories during...
Research on how sleep contributes to memory has blossomed in recent years. These studies have generally focused on whether or not sleep impacts various types of memory independently. An open question is whether sleep interactively influences different memory types. My research focuses on two types of memory—specificity and generalization. Whereas...
Listeners can experience strong and often positive identification with music. Contemporary research has emphasized the importance of a listener’s own identity, including their sense of self and their desires, when forming such identifications. However, acknowledgments of the listener’s role in the listening experience have failed to productively engage discussions of...
This dissertation provides evidence that reading is best explained as rational gathering of visual information to identify words efficiently. Although empirical evidence from human reading research suggests a close link between eye movements and cognitive process, it is not clear how readers decide when and where to move their eyes...
Sentence comprehension requires both syntactic prediction and working memory processes. Evidence suggests that both are impaired in agrammatic aphasia, and can independently contribute to comprehension breakdowns, but the relationship between them, especially during real-time sentence comprehension remains unclear. Two EEG studies investigated on-line processing of sentences with non-local long-distance dependencies...