Language and Memory Are in Focus for Latest Cattell Sabbatical Awards

Gary Lupyan, Tracy Riggins, and Elizabeth Schotter are the latest recipients of the Sabbatical Fund Fellowship from the James McKeen Cattell Fund. These funds are awarded for the 2024–2025 academic year to supplement the sabbatical allowance provided by each researcher’s institution, allowing the recipients to expand their research projects. 

The James McKeen Cattell Fund was established in 1942 to support the science and application of psychology. Learn more about this year’s awardees and their research projects, in their own words, below. 

Learn more about the James McKeen Cattell Fund.

“Cattell Sabbatical Award recipients express their gratitude because the full year away from the many demands of academic life allows busy scholars to explore new directions, learn new skills, test their research ideas and have uninterrupted time to produce new scholarship,” said Duke University professor emerita Christina Williams on behalf of the Cattell Fund trustees. “We are delighted that the award allows our midcareer colleagues a period of time to reset their agenda for their scholarly activities for the years to come.” 

Gary Lupyan  

University of Wisconsin–Madison  

The question at the center of my research is how learning and using language augments human cognition. This question has taken on additional relevance (and urgency!) with the rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) in the form of large language models. These models use language input to learn not only to fluently converse with the user, but to behave in human-like ways on tasks they have never been explicitly trained to do. I am spending the fall semester at the Santa Fe Institute thinking and writing about how to use the tools of cognitive science to better understand the areas where language models clearly depart from human cognition and for understanding what makes language so effective in instantiating something like intelligence in machines that lack sensing, movement, and agency—faculties long believed to be necessary for biological intelligence. I am spending the spring semester at University of California, Berkeley, working with collaborators on several projects related to cognitive styles, putting together tutorials for more effective collection of behavioral data online, and developing a new undergraduate class that connects recent developments in AI to human psychology. 

Tracy Riggins 

University of Maryland, College Park 

“You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives.” —Luis Buñuel 

The ability to remember is important—we realize this when our memory fails us. I have long been fascinated with how memory develops in children and how neural changes support age-related improvements in this ability. Timely advances in developmental cognitive neuroscience have recently expanded our ability to address this question. I have two major goals during my sabbatical. First, I will write a review paper that integrates current knowledge regarding the neural bases of memory development. The last review paper on this topic was published more than 10 years ago (2012), and the field has grown exponentially since then. Second, I will develop a neuroanatomical template that can be used to segment hippocampal subfields from infant MRIs. The hippocampus is a complex structure that is critical for memory. In my previous work, I generated a template to segment hippocampal subfields in preschool-aged children. However, the properties of the infant brain are such that infant MRI images have vastly different contrast. A new template is required to learn more about the development of this structure and its relations with memory earlier in life. This Cattell Sabbatical Award affords me the time required to achieve these goals and launch the next phase of my research program, producing novel information and tools regarding the developmental cognitive neuroscience of memory. 

Read about the 2023–2024 sabbatical awardees. 

Elizabeth Schotter  

University of South Florida  

Curiously, deaf signers have been identified as “natural speed readers,” despite the fact that they do not hear the language that they read so efficiently. My work investigates whether this efficiency derives from a superior ability to process visual language outside where these individuals are looking—a mechanism from which all readers may benefit. Confirming this hypothesis requires a detailed understanding of the relationship between eye movements in reading and the neural language processes that co-occur with them. On my sabbatical, I will work with Brennan Payne (University of Utah) to develop novel approaches to link eye movement behaviors to specific cognitive and neural processes via coregistration of eye tracking and EEG. Also, I will work with Karen Emmorey (San Diego State University) to investigate the unique mechanisms that deaf signers employ when reading naturally. This project will advance theories and methods in the burgeoning field of coregistration (building on my National Science Foundation (NSF) grant with Payne) and will use these advancements to better understand the hallmarks of reading efficiency using deaf signers as a unique test-case (building on my NSF grant with Emmorey). During this time, I will run pilot studies in preparation for subsequent grant submissions to identify promising avenues for unlocking reading efficiency for all readers. In addition, I will make open-access templates of experiment programs and data-analysis scripts and publish methods papers to facilitate the adoption of these novel and potentially paradigm-shifting approaches by other researchers. 

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