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Research Interests
Research in the CLS lab concerns
people's mental models of physical, social, and psychological systems, including how these models are learned, restructured, and used in reasoning. An important part of this research concerns the representation of individual causal relationships. Research from our lab suggests that people represent causal relations in terms of patterns of forces. More recently we have examined reasoning over networks of causal relations (e.g., the causes of global warming, depression, and poverty). Among other questions, we are interested in whether reasoning over these networks replicates (in a qualitative fashion) the physical processes that produce causal chains in the world.
In a second line of research, we have been investigating the linguistic coding of causal events, which varies within and across languages. Interestingly, these different ways of expressing causation are not interchangeable. In particular, work in our lab has
shown that the meanings of causal verbs, such as the verb "cause," don't always translate directly across languages. Further evidence from our lab suggests that these differences in meaning may reflect underlying differences in how the speakers of different languages
(including bilinguals) construe and reason about causal events.
Research in the CLS lab involves a wide range of methodologies, including computer visualization, cross-linguistic comparisons, corpus analyses, and (more recently) neuroimaging. Nearly all of our research involves the development of computer models of both the physical and mental world, with extensions to the meaning of words across languages.
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