Science AMA Series: I’m Stephanie Huette and I study mechanisms of
language and visual processing. AMA!
Abstract
Hi everyone, I am an Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University
of Memphis and an affiliate with the Institute for Intelligent Systems
which is a center for interdisciplinary research
https://sites.google.com/site/stephaniehuette/ . I study language
processing as it unfolds using eye tracking and motion tracking
technologies. Words have a profound impact on behavior, changing
everything from perception, to judgements and decisions we make every
day, all the way up to political viewpoints (e.g.
http://news.sciencemag.org/2010/10/politicians-watch-your-grammar for
discussion of a colleague’s work along these lines). I specifically
study negation and usage of modal verbs “should” and “must” and how
these words are used, affect learning, and activation dynamics in the
lexicon (your mental dictionary). While many people are aware Cognitive
Science has made many advances in Natural Language Processing in machine
learning areas and are being used actively on projects like IBM’s
jeopardy playing Watson, less well known are the advances we’ve made in
the understanding of how people develop and process linguistic
information at both a millisecond, hourly, and yearly timescale. I will
be back at 1 pm ET (10 am PT, 5 pm UTC) to answer questions, Ask me
anything about how you process language (fleeting milliseconds that make
differences in how we understand cognition in general), or how negation
hyperbolizes the perception of truth of a statement (a recent finding in
my lab!)