PEOPLE – Lupyan Lab

Gary Lupyan is a Professor of psychology at UW-Madison. He joined the department as assistant professor in 2010. At the core of his research program are questions like: What does language do for us? What would humans be like without language? Why are languages the way they are and what makes them change? Email Gary at lupyan@wisc.edu for questions/comments/interest in collaboration, and random trivia. He's @glupyan on Twitter.

See the Vitae for a full list of publications/presentations, and Gary’s Google Scholar Profile

When he’s not thinking about science (science!), he is flying, traveling (...well, used to pre-pandemic), and parenting two very energetic boys.

Kira Breeden is a fourth-year PhD student in the Department of Psychology at The University of Wisconsin-Madison, working with Professor Gary Lupyan. Her research sits at the intersection of language and cognition, with a focus on how people process and resolve semantic ambiguity — specifically, how we recover meaning by exploiting the distributional properties of language.

She is interested in how context shapes semantic representation, and how the statistical structure of language provides the scaffolding through which ambiguous meaning becomes interpretable. She also brings an inner speech lens to these questions, investigating how individual differences in inner speech experience predict variation in categorical and semantic cognition. She received a Masters in Data Science from Northwestern University specializing in AI and a B.S. in Computational Cognitive Science from The University of Michigan, where she worked under the supervision of Dr. Twila Tardif and Dr. Susan Gelman.

Aja Altenhof is a graduate student in Linguistics broadly interested in how cognitive, linguistic, and evolutionary forces interact with the development and acquisition of meaning. Before coming to Madison, Aja completed a B.A. in Linguistics and Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania and a MSc in the Evolution of Language and Cognition at the University of Edinburgh. Aja is specifically interested in contrast, both as a tool for learning and as an organizing principle for semantic systems. Website

Marcus Perlman came from hot UC Merced to cold UW Madison to work with Gary and study the creation and evolution of languages (e.g. through communication games in the lab).

His research interests generally fall at the intersections of language, gesture, evolution, and apes. Previously he was a postdoc and lecturer in the Cognitive and Information Sciences department at UC Merced, and before that, a postdoc at the Gorilla Foundation where he studied the gorilla Koko. When he’s doing other stuff, Marcus enjoys walking around, LeBron James and the Miami Heat, and mewing back at his noisy cat Penelope.

Lewis Forder moved to Madison from the University of Sussex in the UK to study the relationship between visual perception, language and categorization. He will be using EEG/ERPs to look at the time course of this relationship.

His PhD thesis focused on examining the time course of color processing in the human brain and how color language affects this color processing. In his last post doc position he investigated the neural mechanisms underpinning rational and irrational decision making in a gaming environment. When he’s not working, Lewis can generally be found rummaging through music stores and trying to learn the guitar (but rarely both at the same time).

Bastien Boutonnet comes from Bangor in rainy (and windy) Wales, UK where he did his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Guillaume Thierry.

He worked as a postdoc in the Lupyan Lab studying the influence of language on categorical and perceptual processes by using neurophysiological measures like EEG in conjunction with brain stimulation TMS. The aim of the work carried out in this post-doc was to uncover a little bit more of the underlying dynamics of language-perception effects. When he’s not studying brains, Bastien likes to act, sing and dance and sometimes all three at the same time! Bastien also misses Yorkshire Tea in the US and will gladly accept donations of such British goods.

Justin Sulik moved to Madison from Edinburgh, where his PhD investigated cognition at the symbolic threshold, looking at the effects of relevance, context and novelty on how humans infer the meaning of various signals, and at how this ability compares with inference in animals.

Other areas of interest include the nature of hypothesis generation (i.e. abduction, as opposed to inductive hypothesis evaluation), insight problem solving, analogy, the evolution of rationality, and pragmatics. The central question of his postdoc project at UW-Madison is what makes some explanations more satisfying than others from a psychological (as opposed to a philosophical, normative) point of view. This research will also explore whether psychologically satisfying explanations are more stable or more likely to spread, and at individual differences in the kinds of explanations people are willing to accept. Outside of work, most of his time is spent reading about, thinking about, playing around with, and ultimately consuming food. He was very pleased to find that Wisconsin’s fried cheese curds turned out to be just as exciting as he was promised, and that UW produces its own ice cream.

Hettie Roebuck completed her PhD in Psychology at the University of Lincoln (UK). Currently she is exploring the inter-relationship between language and cognition. Hettie’s interests stem from a background in auditory and visual executive function in typical and atypical development.

Her primary research has investigated the role and source of listening effort on different aspects of cognition. Her PhD explored how the demand of effortful listening associated with mild hearing loss affected different aspects of cognition, e,g, sustained attention, inhibition and working memory. She was then keen to apply her knowledge and experience in listening effort and cognition to investigate how other processing difficulties may be inducing similar demands in neurodeveopmental disorders (i.e., Specific Language Impairment, Central Auditory Processing Disorder and Autism Spectrum Disorders). Currently she is exploring how we identify and represent what we see and hear, and how our language abilities and strategies for forming representations are related to our cognitive performance. Out of the lab, she enjoys exploring the outdoors, painting, baking and going to the gym to offset the effects.

Christina Schonberg earned a B.A. in Psychology from Northwestern University and a Ph.D. in Developmental Psychology from UCLA. Their research interests include language and cognitive development in infants and toddlers who are raised in different types of language environments (e.g., monolingual vs. bilingual).

Previously, Christina has studied the effects of language background in domains such as cognitive flexibility, visual attention, and word learning. Here at UW, Christina continues to investigate the interaction between early word learning and conceptual development through a joint project between the Lupyan Lab and the Learning, Cognition, and Development Lab (UW-Madison Department of Educational Psychology).