Research

Our work on memory focuses on the interaction between episodic memory and prior knowledge. Episodic memory helps us extract and store information from the noisy signals presented to our senses. This information, in turn, is combined with our prior knowledge about the environment. In the lab, we explore how people use environmental information in retrieval from memory focusing on ecologically valid stimuli. This approach raises several fundamental questions: What knowledge of the regularities of their environment do people bring to the task of remembering? How do people integrate this information with episodic memory? What happens when memory is investigated through the use of naturalistic stimuli – as opposed to more constrained and less natural stimuli – that controls for prior knowledge? Overall, our approach challenges the assumption that memory is error-prone and therefore cannot be trusted. Our work also questions the validity of standard experimental conventions and conclusions about the memory system that have been drawn on this basis of such paradigms.

Our work on language is for the most part conceptual and theoretical. We are interested in questions pertaining to the architecture of the language faculty, its relationship to other cognitive systems, and the role played by language as an expression of human thought and reason. This work is being conducted in the context of Julien Musolino’s new book The Rational Ape: On the origins, Development, and Future of Human Reason, and integrates ideas and conclusions from linguistic theory, philosophy, comparative cognition, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience. Our earlier work on language was experimental and developmental, focusing on the preschool period (roughly 4 and 5-year-old children) and questions at the interface between form and meaning. This work went on for many years, producing incremental contributions to knowledge, as normal science (in the Kuhnian sense) typically does. However, there has long been suspicions, at least in Musolino’s mind, that the paradigm within which such work has been carried out is flawed in important ways. Such considerations have led to a critique of the conceptual foundations of that subfield of language acquisition and a move away from empirical work carried out within the standard paradigm.

Work on agency is both diverse and fundamental in cognitive science. From the perspective of the self, a perennial question asks about the nature and origin of the Sense of Agency (SoA); the experience of control over ourselves and our environment (often related to the question of free will). In our lab, we investigate SoA using both explicit and implicit measures, such as the Intentional Binding paradigm. We are also developing new techniques to measure SoA and new ways to understand the phenomenon theoretically. Looking beyond the self, important questions arise as to when, and under what conditions, we ascribe agency (roughly speaking, a mental life) to other entities in the world. Recent developments in cognitive science suggest that, perhaps because agents are of unique evolutionary significance, our cognitive systems are particularly fine-tuned to detecting, recognizing, paying attention to, talking about, and remembering agents. In the domain of memory, an “animacy effect” has recently been reported whereby animates/agents have been shown to be better remembered than non-agents. We are currently investigating the contours of this effect in the lab.

Beliefs play a central role in our lives: they lie at the heart of what makes us human, they define the boundaries of our cultures, and guide our motivation and behavior. Beliefs also have the extraordinary power to unite and divide people. Today, this observation is perhaps more relevant than ever before. Despite their fundamental importance, however, beliefs have yet to receive a uniform treatment. Indeed, beliefs have been studied across a number of disciplines (e.g., philosophy, theology, sociology, psychology, economics, political science) leading to disparate results and to literatures that do not make contact with each other. This state of affairs calls for a systematic effort to integrate hitherto disconnected lines of research into a single, coherent framework. This new approach is what we call The Cognitive Science of Belief. It represents a systematic, collaborative, and interdisciplinary program of research anchored in the various disciplines that make up the sciences of the mind. Within this framework, we ask three fundamental questions: (1) where do beliefs come from (2) How are beliefs updated, and (3) what are the broader societal implications of our beliefs.

Religious thought and behavior are quintessential human traits, present in all modern cultures, found throughout history, and evident in archeology from most periods of human pre-history. Today, religion represents one of the most ubiquitous forces shaping people’s beliefs, attitudes, and behavior. It would indeed be difficult to make sense of most of human existence, including culture, politics, law, morality, and war, without an appreciation of what religion is and how it works. Within the last few decades, psychologists, anthropologists, biologists, and neuroscientists working under the banner of what has come to be called The Cognitive Science of Religion have joined forces in an effort to try to understand how human minds acquire, generate, and transmit religious thoughts and practices. In the lab, we study the memorability of supernatural concepts (e.g., gods, souls, spirits) and have proposed and empirically tested a new model of the cognitive mechanisms underlying this memory effect. A few years ago, Julien Musolino developed a new undergraduate course called The Religious Mind which explores these fascinating questions.

Our work on decision making focuses on people’s ability to make decisions and predictions about illness statistics. For example, most people have experienced what it is like to have an acute illness such as the common cold but fewer people have direct experience with chronic illnesses such as type II diabetes. Thus, people’s prior expectations regarding the underlying shape and duration of an illness based on their own subjective experience might affect decision-making in cases where such experience is lacking. This asymmetry, in turn, can have important implications for understanding how environmental uncertainty impacts future choice for medication adherence and health outcomes.

Throughout our work, we use computational and Bayesian modeling techniques to provide theoretically informed and quantitatively precise accounts of cognitive structure and operations. For example, memory can be modeled with a simple Bayesian (rational) model which assumes that prior knowledge exerts an influence on episodic recall. This rational analysis emphasizes the relationship between behavior and the structure of the environment. For recall, this assumes that the goal of the memory system is to efficiently store and retrieve relevant information, which needs to be combined with prior knowledge and expectations about the environment. We have extended this approach to several other cognitive domains including belief updating, decision-making, prediction, and communicative goals. This general application of Bayesian inference has the potential to provide answers to important theoretical and empirical questions as our work has already begun to demonstrate.