My work investigates concepts, their acquisition, and the relation between language and thought. Most of my work is experimental, but computational models of learning are a useful tool for me as well. I am currently particularly interested in event concepts.
Concepts pervade every aspect of cognition from reasoning to memory.
I have been particularly interested in learning from observation without supervision or feedback provided by a teacher. Conceptual structure and language are closely intertwined. The idea that language strongly influences thought is an old one, but evidence for it is very mixed. Event concepts and their acquisition may be particularly influenced by language, because language provides a great deal of information about events and because event concepts seem to be less strongly determined by perceptual factors than object concepts. In recent studies and work in progress we are tracing out the influence of language on the learning of new event concepts and the interpretation of particular examples.