Elman Prize

Scientific Achievements

Teenie Matlock’s research program addresses language at the intersection of perception, action, society, and technology. Her research has made important contributions to our understanding of the role of language and communication in cognition, politics, social media, and climate science. She is a leading figure in Cognitive Science in general, and Cognitive Linguistics in particular. Teenie’s research has demonstrated that linguistic understanding emerges from dynamic processes grounded in human physical experience, including visual motion perception, self-motion, and everyday interaction with technology and society. She has made contributions to metaphor comprehension, image schema representations of verbs, linguistic negation, verbal aspect, social distance, and time and number representation. In particular, she is known for her work on fictive motion. This research has shown that the implied movement in a fictive motion sentence is psychologically real, and it detectably alters the ways in which a reader or listener understands it. She also has published a number of articles showing that subtle characteristics of language usage can have strong consequences for people’s voting preferences. In terms of language and technology, Teenie and her collaborators have explored how autonomous artificially intelligent avatars can take advantage of their own simulated embodiment to employ language, gestures, and visual gaze to improve interactions with people. Finally, Teenie’s research has provided insights into climate communication. In much the same way that small changes in the grammar of a sentence can have large consequences in real-world political decisions, she has shown that subtle changes in the wording of press reports on climate science issues can have robust effects on how people understand the facts about climate change. 

Community Building

Teenie Matlock (a Native American from the Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation) has led, and played instrumental roles in, community building, service, and outreach in numerous inspiring ways. Within Cognitive Science, Teenie played a central role in founding, building, and maintaining the Department of Cognitive & Information Sciences at UC Merced. She has hosted retreats, and chaired or participated in a huge number of committees, workshops, and groups. Her tireless multi-level efforts allowed her to nurture the growth of Cognitive Science at UC Merced. She also won UC Merced’s Senate Award for Excellence in Faculty Mentoring in 2015. In the community as well as within academia, Teenie has promoted and fought for the visibility and rights of indigenous people. Teenie has promoted the visibility and support systems of Native American students and faculty members at UC Merced, and in the entire University of California system. She played an important role in facilitating the recent UC System decision to make tuition free to California Native students of federally recognized tribes. She frequently has served on her Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation’s tribal council, where she has promoted the benefits of higher education to the community. Teenie also served as Vice Chair, American Indian Council of Mariposa County. Furthermore, she recently spearheaded the construction of Toloma Grove, a reflection garden on the UC Merced campus dedicated to celebrating Native American tribes and their cultural practices and societal challenges. She currently is a Special Advisor to the Chancellor on Indigenous Matters at UC Santa Cruz. Teenie also served on the UC system’s President’s Advisory Council on Campus Climate, Culture, and Inclusion (2010-2013). In addition, due to her research on communicating climate issues, Teenie served on the University of California Climate Solutions Groups (2015-present), and Co-Chaired UC Merced’s Center for Climate Communication (2016-2018). This Center conducts and promotes research on communicating climate issues, including studying how the content and mode of presenting climate information influences how the general public reasons about uncertainty and risk, working with people to develop better ways to talk about and think about climate issues, and hosting and participating in outreach and educational activities. Finally, Teenie was given an Athena Award in 2021 from the Women in Tech Initiative to recognize those who embody, encourage, and promote the inclusion of women in technology.

The recipient of the 3rd Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building is Franck Ramus . This honor will be celebrated at the CogSci 2022 conference with a prize and dedicated symposium.

Biography

Franck Ramus received his PhD in Cognitive Science from EHESS (École des hautes études en sciences sociales), Paris in 1999, under the supervision of Jacques Mehler. He continued as a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, and then returned to Paris. Since 2002, he is a tenured CNRS researcher at the Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure – PSL University, Paris.

Scientific Achievements

Franck Ramus has used the tools of cognitive science to characterise the core deficits in dyslexia. He compared the cognitive profiles of children with different neuro-developmental disorders, including those with dyslexia, with autism and with developmental language disorders, to better distinguish the core deficits from the non-specific comorbidities. He participated in major international cross-language collaborations on causes of reading difficulties and effects of orthographic complexity. He used an epidemiological approach in his ongoing study of two French birth cohorts to uncover the complex causal pathways that underlie cognitive development. Together with his team he produced the first population norms for brain structure using UK Biobank neuroimaging data on 40K individuals.

Community Building

Franck Ramus is one of the main promoters of cognitive science in the French-speaking world and beyond. He currently directs one of Europe’s best programs in Cognitive Science, the Master in Cognitive Science at ENS-PSL, University of Paris, and EHESS. He has been a tireless advocate of evidence-based psychology and psychiatry as well as evidence-based education. His writings have been instrumental in shaping the new French policy on autism and the National Strategy for Autism and Neurodevelopmental disorders, firmly combatting widespread non-evidence-based approaches. Through strategic use of popular science platforms and through his blog, he has energetically promoted open science and has embarked on major public debates on education. His dedication to the community, as seen in his creation of a new online course on ‘Psychology for Teachers’ has gained him a huge following.

The recipient of the 2nd Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building is Wei Ji Ma. This honor will be celebrated at the CogSci 2021 conference in Vienna with a prize and dedicated symposium.

Biography

Wei Ji Ma received his PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Groningen in 2001. He continued his path through Cognitive Science with postdocs in Biology at the California Institute of Technology and in Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the University of Rochester. Wei Ji was then an Assistant Professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the Baylor College of Medicine from 2008-2013. He currently is an Associate Professor in the Center for Neural Science and Department of Psychology at New York University.

Scientific Achievements

Wei Ji Ma has made impressive contributions to Cognitive Science in a number of areas, including perceptual decision making, neural coding and computation, working memory, and planning. He has a long-standing interest in how humans make perceptual decisions and, in particular, the extent to which such decisions correspond to an ideal Bayesian observer that takes into account noisy measurements, estimates of measurement uncertainty, prior knowledge, and the costs and benefits of outcomes. In his research, Wei Ji has contributed to our understanding of the limits of Bayesian models when computational requirements become extensive, and perceptual decision making in dynamic environments and multi-sensory contexts. He was part of a team that made fundamental contributions to the theoretical basis of neural computation in the “Bayesian brain” paradigm. This work was a team effort, but Wei Ji was the lead author of by far the most important article in this stream, the Nature Neuroscience 2006 classic on probabilistic population codes that already has been cited almost 1,400 times. Furthermore, his work on probabilistic models of visual working memory is particularly noteworthy. Wei Ji demonstrated how computational models can resolve much of the controversy between slot-based and continuous-resource accounts, in part by elucidating when existing experiments could not effectively discriminate between these accounts, and then by designing innovative discriminating experiments guided precisely by his computational models. Overall, Wei Ji’s research stands out because of its beautiful interplay between theory and experiment, connected by exemplary mathematical rigor and clear common-sense thinking. 

Community Building

Wei Ji Ma’s community building efforts are numerous, diverse, and inspiring. They include multiple innovative mentoring efforts within his and other universities, as well as working with the general public in multiple ways. Wei Ji is the Co-Director of the Training Program in Computational Neuroscience, funded by a five-year NIH training grant. He co-founded the “Growing Up in Science” mentorship series, and he organizes and moderates this series for Psychology, the Center for Neural Science, and Neuroscience at NYU. In these seminars, faculty members tell their personal career story to students and postdocs, emphasizing the difficulties they faced and how they overcame them. This helps trainees to realize that most paths to an academic career are winding and full of potholes, so if they themselves are facing doubts and difficulties, that does not mean they cannot succeed in academia. “Growing Up in Science” has been replicated at greater than 30 other universities. Wei Ji also founded “Meet Your Professors” at NYU. Outside of academia, Wei Ji is a founding member and leader of the Scientist Action and Advocacy Network (ScAAN; www.scaan.net). ScAAN is a group of New York area scientists who provide pro bono science consultation and data analysis services to non-profit social progress organizations by writing knowledge briefs for lay audiences, and by analyzing and visualizing data. As part of this, Wei Ji led the production of a knowledge brief for Raise the Age (raise the age of criminal responsibility from 16 to 18 years old in New York State, which was passed in 2018), and he testified in front of New York City Council committees. He also led a partnership between ScAAN and BagItNYC to ban single-use plastic bags from New York State (which came into effect in 2020). Wei Ji also is a founding member of NeuWrite NYU, a consortium of neuroscientists and writers who meet monthly to workshop neuroscience writings for general audiences. Finally, he co-founded and is the Chairperson of the Rural China Education Foundation (www.ruralchina.org), which works to improve the relevance of education in rural China to children’s lives.

The recipient of the inaugural Jeffrey L. Elman Prize for Scientific Achievement and Community Building is Jenny Saffran. This honor will be celebrated at the CogSci 2020 conference in Toronto with a prize and dedicated symposium.

Biography

Jenny Saffran received her BA in cognitive science from Brown University, then completed a PhD in psychology at the University of Rochester with Elissa Newport and Richard Aslin. She has been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Madison since 1997. In 2005 she was appointed full professor and in 2018 she became the Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor.

Scientific Achievements

Jenny Saffran’s interests concern a seminal question in cognitive science: How do children acquire language? Acquiring language depends on a combination of innate structure and learning from experience. Saffran and her colleagues developed laboratory methods to study the experiential input to infant language learning to test specific theories about how learning unfolds. Her experimental research demonstrates, quite remarkably, that humans, including infants, acquire language by tracking statistical information available in the environment. For example, infants learn to segment words by relying on statistical probabilities. Across a language, the transitional probability from one sound to the next will generally be greatest when the two sounds follow one another within a word than across words, as when (in English) the sounds ‘preh’ and ‘tee’ are more likely to follow one another within a word (‘pretty’) than are the sounds ‘tee’ and bay’ (although they sometimes do, when we say, ‘pretty baby’).

At the same time, Saffran recognizes that even the most powerful learners are not blank slates, and has sought to delineate constraints on learning. Her experimental results suggest that learners can use statistical cues to acquire hierarchical phrase structure, an abstract component of linguistic syntax. In particular, she has demonstrated that some computations are favored over others, and that these constraints on learning are related to natural language structure. These results support the emerging perspective that, rather than evolving in a vacuum, human languages evolve to fit the human learner. By comparing statistical learning in linguistic versus nonlinguistic domains, her research offers a direct, innovative way to test the hypothesis that the uniqueness of human language resides in the nature of human learning and not in some specialized language-specific modules within the brain.

Community Building

Saffran is a community builder in her teaching, in her lab, at the University of Wisconsin, and for cognitive science. First, she has worked tirelessly to improve undergraduate students’ experiences at the university. For example, she developed an innovative peer-tutoring program in her large-enrollment Child Development class. Second, as leader of a very active and productive lab, she has built a supportive and nurturing community for training the next generation of scholars. Saffran encourages students to develop their own research questions and ideas, and she serves as a supportive guide along this path. Third, she plays a central role in her department and at her university. For example, she played a key role in the recent reorganization of the Language Sciences program at Wisconsin. Fourth, Saffran is a generous collaborator who has forged close ties with researchers who study developmental disorders, in an effort to understand the underlying causes of language delays and differences, she collaborates with researchers who study animal cognition, and has worked on methodological issues in infant research. In all aspects, Saffran advances the cognitive science community.