Lawrence W. Barsalou, Ph.D.

Biographical Information

Lawrence Barsalou is Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Psychology at Emory University. He received a bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 (working with George Mandler), and a Ph.D. in Psychology from Stanford University in 1981 (working with Gordon Bower). Since then, he has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, returning to Emory in 1997. Barsalou’s research addresses the nature of human knowledge and its roles in perception, memory, language, and thought. The current theme of his research is that the human conceptual system is grounded in the brain’s modal systems. Specific topics of interest include whether (and if so how) modal systems implement symbolic operations and abstract concepts. Other lines of research address the situated character of knowledge, the dynamic online construction of conceptual representations, the development of ad hoc categories to support goal achievement, the structure of knowledge, and category learning. Barsalou’s research has been funded primarily by the National Science Foundation. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship; served as the chair of the Cognitive Science Society; won an award for graduate teaching from the University of Chicago; is a Fellow of the American Psychological Association, the American Psychological Society, and the Cognitive Science Society.

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