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My research focuses on those complex forms of
cognition that are distinctly human, and indeed make us
human.
What is the computational substrate of complex
cognition, and how is it implemented by the brain?
I pursue this question by developing cognitive
neuroarchitectures, which are formalisms shaped by the
findings of cognitive science and neuroscience in which
computational models are written. In collaboration
with Marcel Just at Carnegie Mellon University, I have
developed the 3CAPS and 4CAPS architectures.
Complex cognition cannot be wholly understood at the
abstract level of cognitive neuroarchitecture. The
symbolic structures that characterize language differ
from those that characterize mathematics, and these
differences are critical. One way to understand
them is by constructing models that account for their
empirical regularities. I have developed 4CAPS
models of sentence comprehension, mental rotation,
problem solving, and dual-tasking. These models
account for behavioral and brain imaging data collected
from normal adults and neuropsychological patients.
My experimental work focuses on two domains,
mathematical reasoning and discourse comprehension. With
respect to mathematical reasoning, my studies of how
people understand an abstract mathematical concept,
negative integers, have revealed the mental
representation that adults use and how it differs from
that of elementary school children. This work
includes behavioral experimentation and mathematical
modeling, and in collaboration with Daniel Schwartz and
Vinod Menon of Stanford University, is being extended to
fMRI and instructional interventions. I am also
pursuing a number of other topics in mathematical
cognition including place value and arithmetic.
Another line of empirical research concerns discourse
comprehension. I am running studies of anaphor
resolution and script-based story understanding, and
showing how exemplar models of long-term memory such as
SAM and Minerva-II can account for their results.
Selected publications
Baroody, A. J., & Varma, S. (in press). The
active construction view of basic number fact knowledge: New
directions for cognitive neuroscience. In J. Baek, A. E. Kelly, & L.
Kalbfleisch (Eds.), Neuropsychology and mathematics education.
Varma, S., McCandliss, B. D., &
Schwartz, D. L. (2008). Scientific and pragmatic
challenges for bridging education and neuroscience.
Educational Researcher, 37, 140-152.
Just, M. A., & Varma, S. (2007). The
organization of thinking: What functional brain imaging
reveals about the neuroarchitecture of cognition.
Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Neuroscience, 7,
153-191.
Complete
vitae [.pdf]
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