Society Fellows

Ruth Byrne is the Professor of Cognitive Science at Trinity College Dublin, University of Dublin, Ireland, in the School of Psychology and Institute of Neuroscience. Her research expertise is in the cognitive science of human thinking.  Her experimental work focuses on reasoning and on imaginative thought, and has advanced theoretical understanding of the common cognitive processes underlying rationality and creativity. Her books include, “The rational imagination: how people create alternatives to reality” (2005, MIT press), “Deduction”, co-authored with Phil Johnson-Laird (1991, Erlbaum Associates), and “Thinking, reasoning, and decision-making in autism”, co-edited with Kinga Morsanyi (2019, Routledge). Her BA degree was awarded by University College Dublin in 1983 and she completed her PhD at Trinity College Dublin in 1986. She worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, as a lecturer in the psychology department at the University of Wales at Cardiff, and then in the computer science department at University College Dublin, before moving to the psychology department at Trinity College Dublin in 1992. She has been a member of the Royal Irish Academy since 2007 and was awarded its 2021 Gold Medal for Social Sciences. 

Seana Coulson is the Jeff Elman Chancellor’s Endowed Chair of Cognitive Science at the University of California, San Diego, the Co-Director of the UCSD/SDSU Joint Doctoral Program in Language and Communicative Disorders, and a faculty affiliate of the UC San Diego Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind. She holds a B.A. degree in Philosophy (Magna cum Laude with Departmental Honors) from Wellesley College, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Cognitive Science from the University of California, San Diego. She is the author of Semantic Leaps published by Cambridge University Press and was a founding editor of the inter-disciplinary journal Language and Cognition. She currently serves on the Editorial Boards of Cognitive Semiotics, Discourse Processes, Psychophysiology, and Review of Cognitive Linguistics. Research in the Brain and Cognition Lab uses techniques from linguistics, psychology, and cognitive neuroscience to investigate how people construct meaning. Current projects tackle questions such as how multimodal input influences speech and language comprehension, the relative importance of linguistic versus cultural knowledge for L2 humor comprehension, how language users exploit both sensorimotor activations and the statistics of language, and how cultural evolution influences the properties of semiotic systems.

Dr. Arthur Graesser is professor emeritus in the Department of Psychology and the Institute of Intelligent Systems at the University of Memphis, as well as an Honorary Research Fellow at University of Oxford. He received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at San Diego.  His research interests include text comprehension, inference generation, conversation, question asking and answering, tutoring, memory, emotions, artificial intelligence, computational linguistics, and human-computer interaction. He served as editor of the journals Discourse Processes (1996–2005) and Journal of Educational Psychology (2009-2014) and as presidents of four societies, including the Society for Text and Discourse, the International Society for Artificial Intelligence in Education, and the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences. He has published over 800 articles in journals, books, and conference proceedings, including 3 books and 24 co-edited books. He and his colleagues have developed and tested software in learning, language, and discourse technologies, including those that hold a conversation in natural language and interact with multimedia (such as AutoTutor) and those that analyze text on multiple levels of language and discourse (CohMetrix). He was a member of five expert panels on problem solving assessment with OECD and five panels with the National Academy of Sciences, including the recent edition of How People Learn?

Ping Li is Sin Wai Kin Professor in Humanities and Technology, Chair Professor of Neurolinguistics and Bilingual Studies, and Dean of the Faculty of Humanities at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. He was previously Professor of Psychology, Linguistics, and Information Sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, and served as Program Director of Cognitive Neuroscience and Perception, Action, and Cognition programs at the U.S. National Science Foundation. Li’s research is focused on investigating the neurocognitive and computational bases of language acquisition, bilingualism, and reading comprehension. He uses cognitive neuroscience approaches and emerging technologies to study the neuroplasticity and individual differences in both children and adults, aiming at understanding the relationships among language, culture, technology, and the brain. Li is currently Editor-in-Chief of Brain and Language and Senior Editor of Cognitive Science. He was President of the Society for Computation in Psychology, and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the Psychonomic Society, and the Cognitive Science Society.

Prof. Dr. Asli Ozyurek is Director of Multimodal Language Department at the Max Planck Institute Psycholinguistics and is a Principle Investigator at Donders Institute at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She received her undergraduate degree from Bogazici University in Istanbul and PhD from the University of Chicago, US. Her research focuses on the role language plays, as a dynamic, adaptive and flexible system, in guiding human (neuro)cognition and communication. To do so she uses a crosslinguistic and multimodal approach,  and investigates the neural, cognitive and social foundations of how language is used in embodied and interactional contexts through bodily actions (in hands, face etc) in cospeech gestures and sign languages. In her research she has aimed to conventionalise a view of language and linguistics as a multimodal phenomena where bodily actions are an essential aspect of  language that allows language transmission, acquisition and evolution.  Recently

she investigates  how machines can improve language use in a multimodal approach. Ozyurek has received many career grants such from  ERC, Dutch Science Foundation (VIDI and VICI) and has taken part in US (NIH, NSF), Dutch and European level scientific colloborations and consortia (Language in Interaction, MEDAL and MULTIDATA). She is an elected member of Academia Europea and has received an ASPASIA award from Dutch Science Foundation.