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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. One major emphasis is the representation causal relationships. Research from our lab suggests that people represent these relations in a manner that reflects the dynamic properties of the world. 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 reenacts (in a qualitative fashion) the physical processes that produce causal interactions in the world.
In another area of research, we have been investigating the linguistic coding of events across languages. We have found, for example, that the meaning words encoding even the most fundamental of concepts, such as the concept of CAUSE, differs systematically across languages and that languages appear to differ in the kinds of entities that can be described as causal agents.
Research in the CLS lab involves a wide range of methodologies, including computer visualization, cross-linguistic comparisons, corpus analyses, and (more recently) neuroimaging. Much of our research involves the development and testing of computational models, as well as, the study of special populations, such as bilinguals.
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