At the invitation of the Human Cognition Laboratory, and with a presentation by Professor Ana Paula Soares, Dr. Ian Simpson will present the lecture "A Field at the Crossroads – Can Implicit Statistical Learning be Measured in Real Time?" on November 24th at 12:15 PM in the Multimedia Auditorium of EPsi. In this series of lectures, the Research Laboratories of CIPsi invite prominent national and international figures in their research fields to share different perspectives, methodologies, and approaches in the scientific investigation of the mind and behavior.
Bio
Dr Ian Simpson is a psycholinguist with interdisciplinary training in Cognitive Science, Linguistics, Cognitive Neuropsychology, and Computer Science. He received his PhD from Macquarie University (Australia; 2009) and between 2010 and 2013 he held postdoctoral positions at the University of Sydney and the University of Granada where he was a Marie Curie Fellow. Between 2014 and 2021 Dr Simpson was a professor at the Universidad Loyola Andalucía (Seville) in the department of Psychology. Currently, he is a postdoctoral researcher in the Mind, Brain and Behaviour Research Centre (CIMCYC) in the University of Granada. His primary research interest examines processes that underpin reading and spelling. In addition to exploring the developmental trajectory of literacy acquisition, he seeks to understand the contributions made to reading by basic cognitive abilities with a view to furthering our understanding of dyslexia and other reading problems. His second research interest examines implicit/statistical learning. This work seeks to better understand this important cognitive process, as well as exploring a possible link between an implicit learning deficit and dyslexia. His publications can be viewed here.
Abstract
Implicit/Statistical Learning (ISL) is a fundamental theoretical construct in cognitive science. Over the last two decades ISL has been shown to be implicated in a wide range of basic and higher order cognitive functions such as vision, audition, motor planning, event processing, reading, speech perception, language acquisition, semantic memory and social cognition, among others. (Frost, Armstrong, & Christiansen, 2019). Due to these factors, the study of ISL has generated enormous interest in the last decade. Additionally, some authors have reported a relationship between low levels of ISL and dyslexia (for example, Sigurdardottir et al, 2017, but see Schmalz, Altoè, & Mulatti, 2017, for an opposing view). However, a series of recent and influential articles (Armstrong et al., 2017; Frost et al., 2019) have concluded that, without a clear paradigm shift, the field will likely stagnate. Typical ISL experiments contain two phases; a learning phase in which participants are exposed to material which, unbeknownst to them, is structured in some way. This is followed by a test phase to determine if, and how much the participants were able to learn. Hence, only the final level of ISL is determined. Armstrong and Frost et al., have called for the development of techniques that allow the evaluation of the trajectory of ISL in an "online" manner, as it takes place in real time, instead of the mere evaluation of the final level of SL once learning has concluded. In this talk Dr Simpson will talk about his current research project whose goal is to develop an online measure of ISL. Following on from this, Dr Simpson will briefly talk about another project of his which has implications for investigators who use masked priming in naming and lexical decision tasks.