Lawrence W. Barsalou (born November 3, 1951) is an American psychologist and a cognitive scientist, currently working at the University of Glasgow.
Career At the University of Glasgow, Barsalou is a professor of psychology, performing research in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. He received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 (George Mandler, advisor), and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University in 1981 (Gordon Bower, advisor). Since then, Barsalou has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, joining the University of Glasgow in 2015. Barsalou’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and other US funding agencies. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship, served as the chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and won an award for graduate teaching from the University of Chicago. Barsalou is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Mind and Life Institute, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is a winner of the Distinguished Cognitive Science Award from the University of California, Merced.
Research Barsalou's research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, and health cognition. Across domains, much of this work focuses on the impact of goals and environmental context on cognitive processing, as well as how multimodal simulation, situated conceptualization, and embodiment ground conceptual processing.
Ad hoc categories Perhaps Barsalou’s most notable contribution to the field of cognitive psychology is his research on ad hoc, or goal-derived, categories. Prior to this work, the vast majority of research on the cognitive representation of categories dealt solely with taxonomic categories, in which category membership is established due to overlap in both conceptual and physical features. However, Barsalou (1983) posited that this is not the only type of category. While featural relatedness intrinsically forms taxonomic categories that can be used to guide cognition, the formation of other types of categories is required for us to accomplish goals. These categories, termed ad hoc categories, are actively constructed from existing knowledge in order to satisfy the demands of a specific goal context. Ad hoc categories differ from traditional categories in two principle ways. First, they violate the correlational structure of the environment. In line with previous work by Rosch et al. (1976), properties of items within the environment are not independent, but rather certain attributes tend to co-occur within specific categories. However, this is not a requirement for ad hoc category membership, given that relatedness is construed based on goal satisfaction rather than featural relatedness. Second, in contrast to taxonomic categories, ad hoc categories are often constructed on-line, and thus are not well established within long-term memory. However, it is thought that while ad hoc categories are representationally distinct from taxonomic categories, they exhibit a comparable graded similarity structure, in which a member of the category may be seen as more prototypical of the given category compared to other members. Barsalou (1991) used the classic ad hoc category example of things to pack for a vacation. When packing for a trip, one actively constructs this category in order to pack the appropriate items. For new goal-based categories, planners must derive the ad hoc categories themselves before they can consider and select appropriate category members, or instantiations. Planners would then use well established knowledge of other categories to generate candidates for the ad hoc category and then test them for membership. For example, one might use the established knowledge of the category of clothing to consider whether or not they need to pack a bathing suit for their vacation- if they decide in the affirmative, then bathing suit becomes a member of the ad hoc category. Thus, Barsalou (1991) posited that ad hoc category members would not necessarily share many features (i.e., bathing suit, money, toothpaste), but would nevertheless be members of the same ad hoc category because they similarly satisfy the requirements of the current behavioral goal of things to pack for vacation. This work has been exceptionally influential within the study of categories, and has played a large role in illuminating the flexibility of semantic relatedness and the influence of specific behavioral goals on short and long-term conceptual representations.
Grounded cognition Barsalou has also been an outspoken advocate for grounded views of cognition, and has developed several influential models of grounded cognitive processing within specific domains. According to traditional cognitive theory, semantic memory is represented in an amodal format and is distinct from the low-level perceptual processes used to encode information from the surrounding environment. However, beginning with the influential work by Lakoff & Johnson (1980), some cognitive scientists, including Barsalou, have posited that cognitive representations are actually deeply embodied, such that semantic memory representations are directly mediated by perceptual systems. Barsalou, in particular, has contributed much research to the field of grounded cognition. According to Barsalou (2008), grounded cognition refers to the belief that simulations within specific sensory systems, bodily states, and situated action mediate all cognitive processing. Citing evidence from psycholinguistic, action planning, and social cognition research, Barsalou has suggested that grounded cognition is well positioned to facilitate the development of testable models within cognitive psychology. He has gone on to use a grounded approach to diverse areas within cognitive psychology, including conceptual representations, attitudes, emotion, prejudice, mindfulness, and eating behaviors.
… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.
