Michael J. Spivey, Associate Professor
Broadly defined,
my interest is in information integration. My research interests include
visuolinguistic processing, sentence processing, word recognition, visual
attention, visual memory, eye movements, and computational modeling. Using
an eyetracker that a subject wears on his/her head, and simultaneously recording the streaming x,y coordinates of their computer-mouse movements, I get an on-line measure
of some of the probabilistic representations (or "tentative interpretations")
that get computed in real-time as the subject attempts to integrate various
sources of visual and/or linguistic information. An example finding from
this work is that spoken word recognition and syntactic parsing are immediately
influenced by relevant visual context -- thus compromising strict modular
theories of language processing.
Almost all of my empirical work is accompanied by computational accounts of the human data. The general model I am dealing with forces internal representations to compete over a probability space by normalizing inputs, integrating them, and sending recurrent feedback. This Normalized Recurrence model points toward an account of perception and cognition in which information is treated probabilistically, and feedback connections allow context to continuously resolve temporary ambiguities in the input signal.
Selected Recent Publications [full list]
Spivey, M., Grosjean, M. & Knoblich, G. (2005). Continuous attraction toward phonological competitors. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102(29), 10393-10398.
Spivey, M. & Dale, R. (2004). On the continuity of mind: Toward a dynamical account of cognition. In B. Ross (Ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation. Vol. 45. Elsevier. [pdf] [Figure2 Replacement pdf]
Spivey, M., Richardson, D., & Fitneva, S. (2004). Thinking outside the brain: Spatial indices to linguistic and visual information. In J. Henderson and F. Ferreira (Eds.), The Interface of Vision Language and Action. New York: Psychology Press. [pdf]
Richardson, D., Spivey, M., Barsalou, L., McRae, K. (2003). Spatial representations
activated during real-time comprehension of verbs. Cognitive Science,
27(5), 767-780. [pdf]
Grant, E., Spivey, M. (2003). Eye movements and problem solving: Guiding
attention guides thought. Psychological Science, 14(5), 462-466.
[pdf]