Elena Luchkina
Cognitive Scientist at Northwestern University
I am an NIH NRSA postdoctoral researcher at Northwestern University, working with Dr. Sandra Waxman.
I received my PhD in Cognitive Science from Brown University under the supervision of Drs. James Morgan and Dave Sobel. I am also a research associate at UC Berkeley where I collaborate with Dr. Fei Xu.
I investigate the development of symbolic communication and language-mediated knowledge acquisition in three complementary lines of work:
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The development productive links between words and mental representations, which enable learning from language about things one has not experienced directly;
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The role of social contingency in the development of these links;
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Downstream consequences of word-representation links, such as the ability to make inferences about others' knowledge based their use of language.
I use a combination of behavioral and eye-tracking measures and employ live acting, video-recordings, video-chat, and online apps in my experimental manipulations. I also use computational models and corpus analysis in my research.
Aside from conducting my research, I lead the Social Contingency Consortium – an interdisciplinary collaboration of scholars from 30+ institutions worldwide. The main goal of the consortium is to understand behavioral and neural mechanisms underlying the facilitative role of social contingency in human and animal learning.
