Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Psychology Office: 254T Baker Hall
Psychology Phone: 412-268-4194
Email: sarahlaszlo@cmu.edu
Faculty Mentor: David Plaut

Lab link:
http://www.cnbc.cmu.edu/~plaut

Research Interests:

Reading is a process so automatic and ubiquitous that fluent readers rarely notice its complexity. Linking meaning with print is a task that every literate adult can do effortlessly, yet its cognitive and neural mechanisms are exceedingly complex and to date not fully understood. My current work attempts to combine the computational formalism and specificity of computational modeling with physiological data available from Event-Related Potentials (ERPs), in order to produce a model of reading that is both cognitively and physiologically sophisticated.

The cognitive processes thought to be involved in reading are most explicitly described by connectionist models of word recognition, which computationally formalize assumptions about how reading processes work. The neuroanatomy and physiological dynamics of reading are, in contrast, best studied in fMRI and ERP experiments designed to observe the activity of the reading brain in vivo. Sophisticated computational modeling and careful neuroimaging work, however, have yet to come together to produce a computational model of reading that can not just simulate the behavior of participants in cognitive studies, but additionally do so in a way that is consistent with what is known about the physiological systems involved. Currently, I am developing a connectionist model in the parallel distributed processing tradition to simulate electrophysiological data from a corpus of single-item ERPs (e.g., ERPs representing the response across participants to only the word “DOG”.) In the long-term, I plan to extend the model to be able to simultaneously simulate not only the single-item ERP data, but also classic behavioral tasks such as lexical decision and naming latency, and to do so in a way that is constrained by what is known about the anatomical systems involved in each task.

Publications:

Federmeier, K.D. & Laszlo, S. (In Press). Time for meaning: Electrophysiology provides insights into the dynamics of representation and processing in semantic memory. Psychology of Learning and Memory (B. Ross, Ed.), Vol. 51.

Laszlo, S., & Federmeier, K.D. (2009). A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood: An Event-Related Potential study of lexical relationships in sentence context. Journal of Memory and Language, 61, 326-338.

Laszlo, S. & Federmeier, K.D. (2008). Minding the PS, queues, and PXQs: Uniformity of semantic processing across multiple stimulus types. Psychophysiology, 45, 458-466.

Laszlo, S. & Federmeier, K.D. (2007). The Acronym Superiority Effect. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 14(6), 1158-1163.

Laszlo, S. & Federmeier, K.D. (2007). Better the DVL you know: Acronyms reveal the contribution of familiarity to single word reading. Psychological Science, 18(2), 122-127.

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Related Links:

Individual Webpage

The Cognition and Brain Lab at the University of Illinois

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