A computational and experimental examination of learning, memory, and language

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The aim of my research program is to (a) study and understand how people and other animals learn, remember, think, and know, (b) to develop mathematical models based on that understanding, and (c) to apply those models to the design and development of cognitive technologies (e.g., psychologically valid cognitive search engines). I have broken the problem into three interlinking goals. One line of work uses experimental methods to understand how people intuit that a sentence is grammatical or not and uses those data to derive a computational model of meta-linguistic intuition. Another line of work uses experimental methods to study patterns in peoples' intuitive reasoning and uses those data to develop a computational model of the underlying cognitive processes. A third line of work uses the analyses of meta-linguistic intuition and intuitive reasoning to design and develop cognitive search engines that interpret the meaning of a person's search query and find documents that match the intended meaning. Training in my lab gives students a coordinated knowledge of experimental and computational science so they can bring the wisdom of experimental science to bear on the disciplines of cognitive computing and machine learning. Work in the lab includes collaborations with research laboratories in Canada, America, Spain, and Australia.