April 1

12pm

Carnegie 113

Building representations of language requires a wide range of resources and cognitive mechanisms; we integrate information from prior beliefs and multimodal signals together with what the speaker literally said. This talk will provide an overview of my work in this domain, highlighting prior and ongoing experimental research that elucidates the range, time course, and neural underpinnings of these processes. I will conclude with some big-picture notes on the integration of social context, individualized beliefs, and communication modality into models of language interpretation. This research not only deepens our theoretical understandings of cognition but also has broader implications for thinking about communication across a range of real-world social and digital contexts.

Ben Weissman is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Psychology Department at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, MA, where he will be transitioning into an Assistant Professor position in Fall 2026. His research focuses on language processing in context, with additional emphasis on emoji processing. Before his current job at Holy Cross, Ben spent 6 years as a lecturer in the Cognitive Science Department at RPI.