John R. Anderson Collegiate Professor of Psychology, Linguistics and Cognitive Science
About
Additional Research Interests: Neuroimaging, Attention
The goal of our research is to develop theories of language, thought, and action—theories capturing the adaptive nature of human behavior, and grounded in integrated architectures that explain how the computational subsystems of the mind and brain work together.
An over-arching theoretical principle guiding much of our work is bounded optimality— the idea that behavior is the adaptive response to the joint constraints of the biological processing architecture and the external probabilistic environment. The specific topics we focus on are the (boundedly optimal) adaptive control of perceptual, motor, cognitive and linguistic processes; language processing (especially the role of working memory in sentence comprehension and production); flexible artificial intelligence (AI) agents and reinforcement learning; and the interaction of cognition and emotion (especially mirth and other positive emotions).
For a list of publications, visit the Language & Cognitive Architecture Lab site.
Area
- Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
Field(s) of Study
- Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience
