Research
Linguistic Framing
We use language to communicate our thoughts and feelings to others—and get them to think and feel the way we do. A wealth of research has shown that subtly different linguistic messages, or “frames,” can have a powerful impact on attitudes, beliefs, and decision-making. Our work examines several kinds of linguistic framing—lexical, syntactic, and others—and the mechanisms underlying their effects. One key mechanism is pragmatic reasoning: many framing effects are driven by people’s ability to “read between the lines” of a message and draw inferences about the communicative intentions of the speaker or writer.
Categories in Language and Mind
Languages differ markedly in how their words and grammatical structures partition the world into categories. According to the classic Whorfian hypothesis, this linguistic diversity leads speakers of different languages to think in systematically different ways. Although this proposal has a controversial history in cognitive science, much recent research has vindicated it—including studies from our lab on spatial categories. At the same time, some of our work complicates the Whorfian story by revealing striking cross-linguistic similarities in concrete and abstract concepts, and by showing that people often think along categorical lines not marked in their native language, like when discriminating colors and objects.
Spatializing Abstract Concepts
Across many cultures, people construct a mental number line, implicitly associating smaller numbers with the left side of space and larger numbers with the right. In several studies, we have explored the reliability, flexibility, and ecological validity of this number-space mapping. We have also investigated whether numbers are mapped to other spatial axes and whether other forms of quantity—like the intensity of facial expressions and emotion words—are also implicitly spatialized. Our findings highlight deep connections between number and other conceptual domains and the ubiquitous role of space in reasoning about them.
Metascience on Mentoring
Our lab not only does undergraduate research but also studies how it works (or should work). We have critically evaluated different models of research mentoring (e.g., mentor as “sculptor” vs. “coach”) and examined how integrating basic and applied research can engage students in science and serve as a pathway to real-world impact.