By Dr. Penny Pexman, June 10, 2021, 2:30 – 3:30 pm
This talk is co-hosted by the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour as part of the PNB Colloquium and ARiEAL Research Centre as part of the ARiEAL Speaker Series. Dr. Penny Pexman is currently Professor of Psychology and Associate Vice-President (Research) at the University of Calgary. She earned her PhD in Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in 1998 and joined the University of Calgary the same year. Her research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, Dr. Pexman is interested in how we derive meaning from language, and how those processes are changed by damage or experience. She has published over 150 journal articles and book chapters on those topics. For the past 2 decades her research has been funded by both the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) of Canada, including NSERC’s prestigious Discovery Accelerator Supplement in 2008. She has served on multiple national grant adjudication panels, including NSERC Discovery, Research Tools and Instruments, and Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship committees. She is a Past President of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science, and a current member of the Governing Board for the Psychonomic Society. From 2013-2018 Dr. Pexman was Editor in Chief of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology and is currently Associate Editor of the Journal of Memory and Language. In 2016, she co-founded Women in Cognitive Science Canada, a national organization offering professional development and networking opportunities to promote diversity and inclusion in cognitive science and related disciplines. An award-winning mentor and researcher, Dr. Pexman is an elected Fellow of both the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science.
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Theories of embodied cognition propose that sensorimotor experience is essential to learning, representing, and accessing knowledge. In Dr. Pexman’s research with adults, she has found evidence that sensorimotor or bodily experience is accessed even in very basic language and memory tasks. An embodied framework predicts that sensory experience should also be important in development. In this talk, Dr. Pexman will describe several studies in which she has investigated the role of sensorimotor information in word learning and lexical processing of children aged 5 to 10 years. The results were mixed; while sensorimotor information facilitated some aspects of lexical processing (e.g., word naming, Inkster, Wellsby, Lloyd & Pexman, 2016; Wellsby & Pexman, 2014), it showed null effects in others (e.g., object label learning, Wellsby & Pexman, 2019). In addition, one of the biggest challenges for embodied accounts of conceptual development is to explain grounding of meanings for abstract concepts, like truth, since these cannot be directly experienced through the senses. Dr. Pexman and team have recently tested the proposal that emotion might provide a mechanism for grounding meaning, particularly for words with less concrete meanings (e.g., Lund, Sidhu, & Pexman, 2019; Kim, Sidhu, & Pexman, 2020). Dr. Pexman will argue that on balance the findings from developmental and adult studies are most consistent with the ‘weak embodiment’ or multiple representations proposal, that word meanings are represented in sensory, motor, emotion, and language systems, and different systems are relatively more important for the representation of different kinds of concepts