Hosted by the Deparment of Psychological & Brain Sciences

Abstract: Human language processing involves retrieval of information from the immediate past to resolve long-distance dependencies between words (e.g., linking the pronoun she to an associated preceding word such as princess). Beyond retrieval from the past, the human brain also generates predictions about upcoming information (e.g., when banana is predicted in The hungry monkey peeled the …). This talk will summarize my lab’s research into how memory processes such as semantic richness and interference affect retrieval from the past, how information entropy affects prediction, and how age-related cognitive decline affects both retrieval and prediction processes. Additionally, I will present findings on how linguistic variables, and age-related cognitive decline influence long-term recognition memory for discourse. These results will be discussed in relation to current theories of language processing (such as cue-based retrieval), the predictive processing models of human cognition, as well as theories of cognitive decline such as the Inhibition Deficit Hypothesis.

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