Susan M. Garnsey Cognitive Neuroscience Profile Susan Garnsey received her Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1985. She is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at UIUC and a part-time faculty member in the Beckman Institute Cognitive Neuroscience Group . Garnsey's fields of professional interest are language comprehension and cognitive neuroscience. Susan Garnsey's work at the Beckman Institute investigates how people understand language.
Language comprehension happens very rapidly and usually seems quite effortless.
However, attempts to program computers to interpret natural human language have highlighted just how complex it is. Many different kinds of information must be coordinated, such as the order the words occur in, the meanings of individual words, what else has recently been talked about, the comprehender's knowledge about what kinds of things are likely to be expressed, and more. Garnsey's research examines how and when these kinds of information influence comprehension. Since comprehension happens so quickly, it is important to use measures that monitor comprehension processes very closely in time. These techniques allow her to track changes in comprehension as they happen, without asking people to perform any extraneous task beyond understanding what they read.