lauren a. schmidt email: lschmidt@mit.edu phone: (617) 452-3636 I'm a graduate student at MIT in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. I work in the Computational Cognitive Science Lab with Josh Tenenbaum. research interests I am interested in how we learn and use words. I'm also interested in the relationships between words, properties, and categories of things in the world. One example of a question that intrigues me: How do we know what is possible, as opposed to just what is likely? In other words, having encountered neither, how do we know that it's possible that we might encounter a purple banana someday, but that we won't encounter a banana that is an hour long? Another question I am working on: How do we know how to use an adjective like "tall" or "big" -- which can mean different things for different sets of items (a big mouse is very different from a big elephant)? How do we make judgments about which items are and aren't tall when we see a new category for the first time? Our recent work suggests that people are not using a simple, consistent statistic to decide this, and we are investigating the strategies people use in applying adjectives in various circumstances. teaching Fall 2006: TA for 9.63, Lab in Cognitive Science Spring 2006: TA for 9.012, Cognitive Science Fall 2004: TA for 9.00, Introduction to Psychology papers [PDF] Savova, V., Roy, D., Schmidt, L., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2007). Discovering Syntactic Hierarchies. Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Nashville, TN. [PDF] Schmidt, L.A., Kemp, C., & Tenenbaum, J.B. (2006). Nonsense and Sensibility: Inferring Unseen Possibilities. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, Vancouver, BC. [PDF] Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L.A., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Gentner & Goldin-Meadow (Eds.,) Language in Mind: Advances in the study of Language and Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [PDF] Boroditsky, L. & Schmidt, L.A. (2000). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Philadelphia, PA. Hey, look -- it's Wernicke's and Broca's areas!