People Research Facilities Events
The Political Mind

Meaning underlies the language comprehension process and involves the symbolic interaction of cognitive, social, political, and emotional information. It is uncontroversial that context affects meaning. However, until a new class of large scale computational language model was developed (known as high-dimensional memory models), there was no way to systematically study the shifts of word meanings in different contexts and among different groups of people. The Center is an inter-disciplinary effort of the Psycholinguistics and Computational Cognition Lab in the Psychology Department and the Political Psychology Research Group in the Political Science Department. The Center's goal is to systematically investigate how cognitive and social factors interact with political variables and language and population differences to affect social and political behavior. Using cutting edge computational approaches, we hope to model the political mind. [Center's Vision Statement]