Cognitive and Psychological Sciences

My research asks how human minds pull off the computational feat of using language. People seem to learn language from very little data, all things considered. Our brains run on less energy than a laptop. How do we learn and use language so efficiently? How do we figure out what’s useful for understanding someone else at any given time? How can we learn totally new things from language? Many of these questions intersect with broader questions about how people decide what is useful to think about, what questions they care about answering, or what goals they have in any given situation. Language is so rich, and can express so much, that it begs the question of how we can possibly use it effectively. 

I am also interested in how minds give rise to more subjective aspects of language. How do we decide how to tell a fictional story? How does language make us feel emotions?

I look for approaches that can scale up our theoretical and empirical picture of how people use language. This includes human experiments and a wide range of methods from computational cognitive science, including probabilistic and planning models, program synthesis, and machine learning approaches.