Broadly speaking, research in the Everyday Cognition Lab (ECL) explores how commonplace actions and experiences – like picking up an object, reading a story or newspaper article, or lying on the couch to watch TV – shape how we perceive and think about the world. Leading models of the mind hold that one of the key functions of the cognitive system is to extract and represent statistical regularities (patterns) in the environment (Flusberg & McClelland, 2014), while theories of embodied cognition point out that these regularities are necessarily structured by our own bodies and actions (Flusberg & Boroditsky, 2011). Our work examines how these principles play out in the space of everyday lived experience, affecting everything from how we perceive objects and faces, to how we imagine our surroundings, to how we reason about abstract topics like time, climate change, and even the mind itself.
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ACTION in COGNITIONIn one line of research, we are exploring whether and how our motor experiences with objects shape how we perceive and imagine those objects. For example, we have found that people are slower to mentally rotate objects that are harder to physically rotate, but only if they imagine rotating the objects manually (Flusberg & Boroditsky, 2011). We have also shown that people are more likely to interpret an ambiguous object as an apple when they are first primed with an image of a grasping hand, and more likely to interpret the same object as a cherry when primed with an image of a pinching hand (Toskos Dils, Flusberg, & Boroditsky, 2012; in prep). This effect disappears when the prime hands are already holding another object, supporting the idea that the way we see the world depends, at least in part, on our current action readiness and our anticipation for what comes next. In another line of work, we have found that people are better at classifying and remembering faces that are upright with respect to their eyes, and also when they are upright with respect to the environment (Davidenko & Flusberg, 2012). This suggests we encode orientational regularities in multiple spatial reference frames, which are revealed as we move around the world in our daily lives. Recently, several students in the lab have begun to investigate the cognitive consequences of physical expertise in a variety of complex domains, including dance, music and acting.
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LANGUAGE and THOUGHTWe have been investigating the powerful ways in which the language we speak, read, and hear comes organize how we think about the world in pervasive and often surprising ways. For example, we have found that framing an issue using subtly different labels, narratives, or metaphors can affect attitudes toward and beliefs about everything from obesity (Thibodeau, Perko, & Flusberg, 2015; Thibodeau, Uri, Thompson, & Flusberg, 2017), to depression and addiction (Flusberg, DellaValle, & Thibodeau, 2015; Thibodeau et al., 2015), to climate change (Flusberg, Matlock, & Thibodeau, 2017), to the role of law enforcement in society (Thibodeau, Crow, & Flusberg, 2016), to presidential candidates (Thibodeau & Flusberg, 2017). These studies also reveal that certain individual differences, like political affiliation, can reliably predict the language people prefer to use in these domains. In another line of work, we have found that spatial metaphors which occur in natural language impact cognitive processing. For example, common spatial metaphors for emotional valence (e.g., “I’m flying high, but she’s down in the dumps”) affect how quickly people are able to classify happy and sad faces (Flusberg et al., 2016; in prep). We are also using a variety of methods to explore how and why language comes to influence mental processing more generally. We find that language facilitates abstract thinking by highlighting shared relational structure across domains and systems (Gentner, Simms, & Flusberg, 2009; Thibodeau, et al., 2016), while social experience using language (but not formal instruction) may be necessary to elicit the implicit effects of metaphor framing (Thibodeau, Lee, & Flusberg, 2016).
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MODELS of MINDThe statistician George Box famously wrote, "All models are wrong, but some are useful." Indeed, models in the cognitive sciences are useful because they function as metaphors, helping us understand the messy complexities of human mental life by analogy to a basic set of principles embodied by the relatively simple model in question (Flusberg & McClelland, 2014). My collaborators and I have been taking this approach to try to understand how the same basic learning mechanisms that explain lower-level perceptual and cognitive phenomena might also help account for some of our most sophisticated mental abilities. For example, we have used artificial neural networks to explore how analogical inference and metaphorical conceptual representations can emerge spontaneously from a basic error-driven learning process (Flusberg et al., 2010; Thibodeau et al., 2013; Thibodeau, Tesny, & Flusberg, 2014). Our simulations naturally capture a key set of findings from the developmental literature on relational reasoning and highlight the critical role language plays in the development of metaphor and analogy (see also Gentner, Simms, & Flusberg, 2009). Recently, we have begun testing behavioral predictions that naturally fall out of this way of thinking about analogy, finding evidence that similarity judgments are systematically and dynamically affected by recent learning experiences (Thibodeau, Myers, & Flusberg, 2016).
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