Professor Louise Connell

Professor of Cognition

Research Overview

My research interests surround cognitive science and embodied cognition. Specifically, I'm interested in how mental representations and conceptual knowledge are grounded, how we access and use these representations in language, and how we can create computational models to better understand human cognitive behaviour. I use a range of interdisciplinary methods from experimental psychology and cognitive modelling to corpus linguistics and machine learning. Some recent work has examined how sensorimotor experience (i.e., what we sense via different perceptual modalities, what we do via different action effectors) underpins word meaning, how distributional statistics from language capture important information about conceptual and social knowledge, how information about space and time is mentally represented, and how people combine concepts into new entities.

For more information, see my website and the Embodied Cognition Lab.

Publications
Projects
Activities
PhD Students
Research Groups

Selected Publications

What have labels ever done for us?: The linguistic shortcut in conceptual processing
Connell, L.M. 11/05/2018 In: Language, Cognition and Neuroscience. 11 p.
Journal article

Interoception: The forgotten modality in perceptual grounding of abstract and concrete concepts
Connell, L.M., Lynott, D.J., Banks, B. 5/08/2018 In: Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. 373, 1752, 9 p.
Journal article

Do we know what we're simulating?: information loss on transferring unconscious perceptual simulation to conscious imagery
Connell, L., Lynott, D. 08/2016 In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 42, 8, p. 1218-1232. 15 p.
Journal article

Embodied semantic effects in visual word recognition
Connell, L., Lynott, D. 15/12/2015 In: Conceptual and interactive embodiment. London : Routledge
Chapter (peer-reviewed)

Space-time interdependence: evidence against asymmetric mapping between time and space
Cai, Z.G., Connell, L. 03/2015 In: Cognition. 136, p. 268-281. 14 p.
Journal article

I see/hear what you mean: semantic activation in visual word recognition depends on perceptual attention
Connell, L., Lynott, D. 04/2014 In: Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 143, 2, p. 527-533. 7 p.
Journal article

Principles of representation: why you can't represent the same concept twice
Connell, L., Lynott, D. 07/2014 In: Topics in Cognitive Science. 6, 3, p. 390-406. 17 p.
Journal article

H2020: LANGBOOT: Language bootstraps cognitive complexity
01/06/2017 → 31/05/2022
Research

If it Looks Like a Duck: Emergent Categorical Structure in the Human Conceptual System
01/04/2016 → 31/10/2018
Research

ESRC (External organisation)
Membership of committee