Associate Professor
Ph.D. Carnegie Mellon
Area: Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience

Contact Information

Email: rickl@umich.edu
Psychology Office: 4428F East Hall
Psychology Phone: 734-763-1466

Research and Teaching Interests

My research investigates the computational foundations of human cognition, language, and humor perception. My goal for language and humor is to understand the moment-by-moment mental processes that underly our ability to rapidly piece together grammatical structure and meaning from a string of words, or to rapidly piece together the components required to get a joke (in a cartoon, say). I pursue this goal via computational modeling and empirical studies using a variety of behavioral methods, including eye-tracking. My particular goal for cognition is to understand our ability to compose novel and complex sequences of behavior from existing skills in order to solve new problems. I pursue this goal via computational modeling, and empirical studies using eye-tracking and fMRI (in collaboration with Thad Polk here at Michigan).

Representative Publications

Lewis, R. L. & Vasishth, S. (to appear). An activation-based model of sentence processing as skilled memory retrieval. Cognitive Science.

Van Dyke, J. & Lewis, R. L. (2003). Distinguishing effects of structure and decay on attachment and repair: A cue-based parsing account of recovery from misanalyzed ambiguities. Journal of Memory and Language 49:285-316.

Howes, A., Vera, A., Lewis, R. L. & McCurdy, M. (2004). Cognitive constraint modeling: A formal approach to supporting reasoning about behavior. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society, August, 2004, Chicago.

Polk, T.A., Simen, P., Lewis, R. L., & Freedman, E. (2002). A computational approach to control in complex cognition. Cognitive Brain Research 15:71-83.

Lewis, R.L. (2000). Falsifying serial and parallel parsing models: Empirical conundrums and an overlooked paradigm. The Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 29:241-248.

Lewis, R. L. (1999). Cognitive Modeling, Symbolic. In Wilson, R. and Keil, F. editors, The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.

Recent Media Attention

2005 The Science Channel/The Discovery Channel: "High Class Comedy"
2004 The New York Times, International Herald Tribune, Charlotte Observer, Orlando Sentinel: "Toonology: Scientists Try to Find out What's So Funny About Humor"