
Contact Information
Room 830
Research Areas
Research Interests
- Semantic memory
- Concept representation/formation
- Category learning
- Event representation
- Language learning
- Computational models
- Neural network models
- Event-related potentials
Research Description
I study semantic memory with behavioral experiments, electroencephalography (EEG), and computational models.
I have three ongoing projects:
Superprime: A large-scale single-word priming paradigm that varies several parameters of interest. Broadly, variables manipulate how "strategic" participant responses are, and what tasks are asked of the participant. Our theory predicts an interaction between these variables such that information key to task performance will be leveraged. This project is expected to yield a 3072-participant-strong dataset that is highly amenable to modeling and testing of theoretical predictions.
Modeling the N400: The N400 is a negative-going brain response with a stable latency of ~400ms upon the onset of a stimulus. It has been popularly interpreted as an index of the access of semantic memory. However, computational operationalizations of it have not been agreed upon and comparisons of these operationalizations have mostly been conducted between different model architectures trained on different datasets.
Evidence Accumulation Models of Priming: Evidence accumulation models can provide psychologically interpretable parameters when fit to choice data. So far, there has not been much work on interpreting semantic priming using such models, despite there being intuitive relationships between some model parameters and psychological theories of priming.
Education
I graduated with my B.S. in Psychology (minor in philosophy) from the University of California, Riverside in 2018. My interests in philosophy are closely related to my interests in cognitive psychology-- I'm broadly interested in the philosophy of science, epistemology, and formal logic.
External Links
Highlighted Publications
Chia, L.K. & Willits, J. (2019). The Goal-Dependent Nature of Automatic Semantic Priming. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Cognitive Science Society Conference 2019: Creativity+Cognition+Computation (pp. 1493-1498). Retrieved from https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cogsci19_proceedings-8July2019-compressed.pdf
Recent Publications
Chia, L.K. & Willits, J. (2019). The Goal-Dependent Nature of Automatic Semantic Priming. In A. Goel, C. Seifert, & C. Freska (Eds.), Cognitive Science Society Conference 2019: Creativity+Cognition+Computation (pp. 1493-1498). Retrieved from https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/cogsci19_proceedings-8July2019-compressed.pdf