Visual perception of motion, stereo (depth), and texture, and the development of neurophysiologically plausible computational models.

Studies of visual attention and preattentive location indexing with application to visual tracking, perceptual- motor coordination, and teleoperation; empirical constraints on cognitive architecture, especially for imagery.

Application of computer vision to human-computer interaction (in particular, through the non-intrusive tracking of a user's activities).Perceptual issues in computer graphics.

Reasoning systems for natural language generation and human-computer interaction; formal models of plans, context and mutual knowledge, and linguistic meaning and interpretation.

Comparative syntax, linguistic universals, semantic roles, Amerindian and African languages.

Representation and acquisition of lexical information; development of minimalist and optimality-based theories of phrase structure and functional projections.

Phonetics, phonology and their interface

Phonological theory and the cognitive science of language; interaction of universal constraints on representational well-formedness to define grammatical systems.

Language acquisition and development, semantics, syntax-semantics interface, pragmatics, prosody, representation and processing

Computational models of language learning, phonology, Optimality Theory, the role of linguistics within cognitive science.

Philosophical problems about psychology, including theoretical and experimental investigations of cognitive architecture, psycholinguistics and cognitive development.

Simulationist versus theory-theory approaches to mindreading, including reading emotion in faces; self-knowledge, self-report, and consciousness; descriptive and normative issues in reasoning; folk ontology.

Philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.

The nature of cognitive architecture, including the connectionism/classicism debate; psychosemantics and the theory of meaning for mental representations.

Nature and viability of commonsense (or "folk") psychology, moral cognition & moral reasoning and rationality.

Formal, computational and empirical studies of categorization, shape representation, grouping and perceptual inference in visual perception.

Fully automated, highly diagnostic behavioral screens for abilities in learning and memory in the mouse and zebra fish. Also, animal cognition: spatial, temporal, and numerical learning and reasoning in animals.

Causal and quantitative reasoning, constraints on concept acquisition, and the role of informal environments (e.g., in cognitive development).

Conceptual development and the representation of the physical world, of Agency, and of "theory of mind" in infants and preschoolers; also their impairment in autism.

Specializes in psycholinguistics and research focuses on language acquisition and language processing.

Formal and empirical study of visual object and surface representations. Part-based description of object shape; Computation of surface structure under partial occlusion and transparency; Visual attention.

Language acquisition and learnability theory; the cognitive and neural bases of language, language acquisition, and language processing; studies of sentence processing using neuroimaging.

My interest lies in the study of voluntary actions in general and the emergence of symbolic intelligence from them. In particular, I have been studying natural voluntary arm movements in the context of reaching for and grasping an object, obstacle avoidance, the acquisition and retrieval of a motor program, and more recently on the performance of a parietal patient and of patients with Parkinson's disease. I am also doing research on autism.