Research

My research investigates the mental representation of motion events involving the actions and interactions of people and objects within particular environmental contexts. Because internal mental representations only reveal themselves through their influences on the various cognitive processes that act upon them, my research strategy has been to study event processing in a variety of different tasks that vary in their processing demands. My research has revealed similar phenomena across such disparate cognitive tasks as verb learning, eyewitness memory for events, and classification of the motions of animate creatures, perhaps revealing constraints from the event representations underlying these various types of processing. In particular, this research has revealed a distinction between motions internal to the object or person carrying them out, which I refer to as intrinsic motions, and motions with respect to the larger environment, which I refer to as extrinsic motions. In these various lines of research, intrinsic motions have been found to be closely tied to the identities of the objects carrying them out, suggesting that they are included in object representations. In contrast, extrinsic motions have been found to be easily separated from object information, suggesting that they are represented independently from object information in event representations.