Current Research

Climate Change and Wellbeing

As of the Winter of 2025, my current research is focused on climate change and wellbeing. I’m interested in using qualitative methods to better understand climate change related emotions (e.g., anxiety, grief) in different populations.

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Past Research

Neural Network Models of Implicit Stereotypes

In recent years I’ve been working with some wonderful undergraduate students to develop a PDP account of immediate impression formation. I’m particularly interested in the set of computations that unfold over the first few hundred milliseconds of encountering a face. What knowledge is activated? And how does our knowledge about the world influence the way we see the face, and what we think about the person? Specifically, do biases and stereotypes we encounter in media influence the way we see faces, and if so, what are the mechanisms through which this works?

Neural Network Models of Semantic Memory

For approximately two decades (1996-2016) my research focused on semantic memory and neural network models of word meaning computation. My colleagues and I were especially interested in how word meaning (and more generally, world knowledge) is computed when we encounter a word. Through a combination of behavioural studies and computational models we provided insight into a number of factors that govern word meaning computation, including the importance of correlations among semantic features, the distinctiveness of semantic features, and representational structures that allow for behaviour that looks like it’s driven by conceptual hierarchies even though the representations are not themselves hierarchical. A large set of semantic feature production norms allowed us to design well controlled stimuli for our behavioural experiments and to use the same items, with realistic representations, in our computational models. The norms also allowed us to provide insight into why semantic memory often breaks down in predictable ways in cases of category-specific semantic deficits.