I am a Professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, in the Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience area.  My lab is the UMass Eyetracking Lab. I’m adjunct faculty in the UMass Linguistics Department, and a member of the UMass Cognitive Science Initiative.

I am Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory and Language; previously I was an Associate Editor at both JML and at Cognitive Psychology.  I serve on the Editorial Board of  Journal of Experimental Psychology:  Learning, Memory, and Cognition; Language, Cognition, and Neuroscience; Glossa: Psycholinguistics; and Language and Linguistics Compass.

Most of my work is in psycholinguistics, which is the study of language comprehension and production.  My research focuses primarily on the cognitive mechanisms underlying word recognition and syntactic parsing in fluent adult reading.  In most of my experiments, participants’ eye movements are monitored as they read sentences in which properties of individual words and/or syntactic structure have been manipulated.  More details about my research can be found here. 

I frequently teach a large introductory statistics class for undergraduate majors in Psychology and Neuroscience.  Sometimes I teach an undergraduate seminar on the psychology of reading, and sometimes I teach a graduate course that surveys higher-level cognition (e.g., memory, judgment and decision making, language).

My Ph.D. is also from UMass.  Prior to coming to UMass, I worked on memory for visual scenes and on attentional processes at MIT.  Before that, I received a B.A. in Psychology from Harvard, and an M.A. in Philosophy from the University of Pittsburgh.

Current or recent collaborators include:

• Carlo Cecchetto (University of Milan Biccocca/CNRS Paris)
• Andrew Cohen (UMass Amherst)
• Brian Dillon (UMass Amherst)
• Caterina Donati (University of Paris Diderot)
• Francesca Foppolo (University of Milan Bicocca, Italy)
• Chris Hammerly (University of British Columbia)
• Franziska Kretzschmar (Leibniz Institute for the German Language, Mannheim)
• Dave Kush (University of Toronto)
• Xingshan Li (Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China)
• Amanda Rysling (University of California at Santa Cruz)
• Shayne Sloggett (University of York, UK)
• Panpan Yao (Beijing Language and Culture School, China)