Research Keywords
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Academic Writing
- Writing to Learn
- Active Inference
- Neuroscience and Education
Research Summary
What makes humans unique? At an evolutionary scale, whereas spoken language emerged as the brain function that separated humans from other primates writing has been a cultural invention with unique functions. When someone reads our writing, they infer our thoughts —the conceptual organization that is hidden in our minds. However, the conceptual organization of our minds also changes when we write. This is, writing serves the exceptional and uniquely human goal of (re)organizing our long-lasting beliefs (concepts) about the world —our worldviews.
I direct the "writing-brain laboratory". The laboratory pursues the description, at the formal (or mathematical), cognitive, and neurophysiological levels, the mechanisms through which academic writing facilitates learning in terms of how the mind creates our worldview. To achieve this goal, we combine combining functional magnetic resonance imaging and spectroscopy, mathematical formalisms, and computational models of natural language processing. In the past, my research program has revealed observable spoken linguistic cues, model parameters, and neural signatures associated with conceptual organization in healthy subjects and schizophrenia patients. In the future, I will identify the neural signatures of the effect of writing on the brain, targeting academic learning and developmental disorders (e.g., ADHD)
Courses Taught
- Introduction to Biological Psychology
- Biological Psychology
- Abnormal Psychology
- Introduction to Psychology
Teaching Summary
I enjoy teaching because it allows me to transfer what I find in the writing to learn laboratory to the real world of the classroom. This is, writing not only is the focus of my research program but also the core of my teaching philosophy.
When I teach, I facilitate and assess learning in my students by leveraging the complementary effects of writing-to-learn (WTL) and lectures. I use the term epistemic writing to summarize the effect that WTL exerts on students: a change in their conceptual organization. In an epistemic writing piece, the student reflects on their uncertainty relevant to course content delivered in lectures and provides a solution to this uncertainty. The effect of this simple activity is that the uncertainty with which the student begins writing decreases by the time they finish the activity, an epistemic effect. Crucially, in epistemic writing, the student does not purposely write to me; rather, they write to themselves. This makes writing an enjoyable activity for them as well.
Service Activities
- Faculty Workgroup for the Development of a Science-specific Writing Course