Blair Armstrong

My primary research interests relate to the cognitive and neural representations, processes, and learning mechanisms underlying word comprehension and semantic memory.  This work largely concerns developing theories of how ambiguous words are comprehended, the source of the similarities and differences between written and spoken word comprehension, how learning mechanisms lead to the emergence of cross-linguistic differences in lexical processing, and how newly-learned words are integrated into the lexical system.  Complementing this work, I pursue research into how decision and response systems engage the word comprehension and perceptual systems in different tasks.  My work focuses on developing explicit mechanistic accounts of these cognitive systems.  This work is informed by tightly coordinated computational modeling using biologically-plausible connectionist networks and by empirical investigations using a range of behavioral and electrophysiological techniques.  I am also interested in how computational algorithms can improve experimental methodologies such as stimulus selection, speech onset detection, and data analysis.