Seana Coulson is a cognitive scientist known for her research on the

neurobiology of language Neuroscience is the science, scientific study of the nervous system (the brain, spinal cord, and peripheral nervous system), its functions and disorders. It is a Multidisciplinary approach, multidisciplinary science that combines physiology, an ...

and studies of how meaning is constructed in human language, including experimental

pragmatics In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. The field of study evaluates how human language is utilized in social interactions, as well as the relationship between the interpreter and the int ...

concept Concepts are defined as abstract ideas. They are understood to be the fundamental building blocks of the concept behind principles, thoughts and beliefs. They play an important role in all aspects of cognition. As such, concepts are studied by s ...

semantics Semantics (from grc, σημαντικός ''sēmantikós'', "significant") is the study of reference, meaning, or truth. The term can be used to refer to subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy Philosophy (f ...

, and

metaphor A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. Metaphors are often compared wit ...

s. She is a professor in the Cognitive Science department at

University of California, San Diego The University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego or colloquially, UCSD) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in San Diego, California. Established in 1960 near the pre-existing Scripps Insti ...

, where her Brain and Cognition Laboratory focuses on the

cognitive neuroscience Cognitive neuroscience is the scientific field that is concerned with the study of the biological processes and aspects that underlie cognition, with a specific focus on the neural connections in the brain which are involved in mental proces ...

of language and reasoning. Coulson is best known for her research involving human use of

conceptual blending In cognitive linguistics, conceptual blending, also called conceptual integration or view application, is a theory of cognition developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. According to this theory, elements and vital relations from diverse scen ...

, an unconscious process in human language that combines unrelated concepts into a single consistent idea.

Biography and awards

Coulson earned her B.A. in philosophy at

Wellesley College Wellesley College is a private women's liberal arts college in Wellesley, Massachusetts, United States. Founded in 1870 by Henry and Pauline Durant as a female seminary, it is a member of the original Seven Sisters Colleges, an unofficial g ...

in 1988, graduating ''Magna Cum Laude''. She worked as a Production Editor for

Garland Publishing Garland Science was a publishing group that specialized in developing textbooks in a wide range of life sciences subjects, including cell and molecular biology, immunology, protein chemistry, genetics, and bioinformatics. It was a subsidiary of th ...

in New York City from 1988 to 1989. She then worked as a Research Assistant from 1989 to 1990 in the Department of Psychology at

Hunter College Hunter College is a public university in New York City. It is one of the constituent colleges of the City University of New York and offers studies in more than one hundred undergraduate and postgraduate fields across five schools. It also admi ...

, where she collaborated with Virginia Valian on research involving the use of anchor points in

language learning Language acquisition is the process by which humans acquire the capacity to perceive and comprehend language (in other words, gain the ability to be aware of language and to understand it), as well as to produce and use words and sentences to ...

. In 1990, she began her graduate education in Cognitive Science at University of California, San Diego, earning her M.S. in 1992 and Ph.D. in 1997. Her dissertation, ''Semantic Leaps: Frame Shifting and Conceptual Blending'', was published as a monograph in 2001, and is her most cited work. From 1997 to 1999, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Psychology department at

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory. T ...

. In 1999, she returned to University of California, San Diego as an assistant professor in the Cognitive Science department. In 2002, she earned a University of California Hellman Fellowship award, a fellowship for junior faculty across the University of California system. Her award was for her work titled "''Language Comprehension and the Space Structuring Model: Electrophysiological Investigations''". In June 2004, Coulson and her graduate student, Christopher Lovett, were featured in an article for magazine '' The Scientist. The article, "''Humor and Handedness,"'' discussed her use of jokes as a high-level language input to investigate brain response differences between left- and right-handed individuals. In 2009, Coulson was awarded an

NSF NSF may stand for: Political organizations *National Socialist Front, a Swedish National Socialist party *NS-Frauenschaft, the women's wing of the former German Nazi party *National Students Federation, a leftist Pakistani students' political gr ...

grant from the Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Science. Her abstract, "''Understanding Multi-Modal Discourse: Cognitive Resources and Speech-Gesture Integration",'' was awarded under the Perception, Action & Cognition program. She was promoted to Full Professor at UCSD in 2012. Coulson has earned the Innovative Research Grant, a yearly grant from The Kavli Institute for Brain and Mind, four times. For 2006-2007, she collaborated on two projects titled "''Overcoming overlearning"'' and ''"Lesion-symptom mapping and pragmatic language comprehension"''. For 2014–2015, she collaborated on a project titled ''"A Novel Test of the Grounded Cognition Hypothesis in Grapheme-Color Synesthetes"''. For 2020–2021, she collaborated on two projects titled "''Investigating the Role of Rhythmic Cortical Activity in Processing of Hierarchically Organized Linguistic and Non-linguistic Sequences in Humans and Rats"'' and ''"Auditory deviance detection in single cells, local field potentials, and extracranial EEG".'' Most recently, Coulson and other UCSD Cognitive Science department members Ana Chkaidze, Anastasia Kiyonga, and

Lera Boroditsky Lera Boroditsky (born c.1976) is a cognitive scientist and professor in the fields of language and cognition. She is one of the main contributors to the theory of linguistic relativity. She is a Searle Scholar, a McDonnell Scholar, recipient of ...

were awarded an Innovative Research Grant for 2022-2023. Their proposed collaborative project was titled "''What are thoughts made of? Dusting neural fingerprints of internal representations using phenomenology and information-based neuroimaging"'.''

Research

Coulson's research program was influenced by French linguist

Gilles Fauconnier Gilles Fauconnier () (19 August 1944 – 3 February 2021) was a French linguist, researcher in cognitive science, and author, who worked in the U.S. He was distinguished professor at the University of California, San Diego, in the Department o ...

, one of the founders of the theory of

. She credits her publication of ''Semantic Leaps'' (2001) as a product of 10 years of conversations with Fauconnier. Coulson continues to publish research expanding upon the framework of conceptual blending through use of measuring event-related potential's (ERPs) with

electroencephalography Electroencephalography (EEG) is a method to record an electrogram of the spontaneous electrical activity of the brain. The biosignals detected by EEG have been shown to represent the postsynaptic potentials of pyramidal neurons in the neocortex ...

(EEG). Through this methodology, Coulson uses psycho-linguistically grounded stimuli to reveal stereotyped

electrophysiological Electrophysiology (from Greek , ''ēlektron'', "amber" etymology of "electron"">Electron#Etymology">etymology of "electron" , ''physis'', "nature, origin"; and , ''-logia'') is the branch of physiology that studies the electrical properties of bi ...

responses. Coulson has used ERP methods to investigate many linguistic concepts and has published on topics such as iconic gestures, joke comprehension, and understanding irony. Several of Coulson's publications using ERP involve investigating the role of the N400, an observed response in EEG signals where negativity peaks after about 400 milliseconds following a stimulus onset, often involved in picture recognition or word prediction. Coulson and co-authors have found that the amplitude of N400 responses may be modulated by natural language stimuli. For example, N400 responses were found to be smaller when hearing a joke compared to a non-funny control phrase, and larger when interpreting a

as compared to the literal meaning of a word. Coulson has also worked on research investigating synaethesia in adults. Her work has advanced how scientists understand perceptual organization syntesthetes, including the contextual congruity and potential bi-directionality of colors and numbers.

Representative bibliography

Books

* Coulson, S. (2001). ''Semantic leaps: frame-shifting and conceptual blending in meaning construction''. United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press. * Coulson, S. & Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, B. (Eds.) (2005). ''The Literal and the Nonliteral in Language and Thought.'' Peter Lang. * Gonzalez-Marquez, M, Mittelberg, I, Coulson, S, and Spivey, M. (Eds.) (2007). ''Methods in Cognitive Linguistics''. John Benjamins.

Articles

* Coulson, S., King, J. W., & Kutas, M. (1998). Expect the unexpected: Event-related brain response to morphosyntactic violations. ''Language and Cognitive Processes'', ''13''(1), 21–58, * Coulson, S., & Oakley, T. (2005). Blending and coded meaning: Literal and figurative meaning in cognitive semantics. ''Journal of Pragmatics'', ''37''(10), 1510–1536. * Coulson, S., & Van Petten, C. (2002). Conceptual integration and metaphor: An event-related potential study. ''Memory & Cognition'', ''30''(6), 958–968. * Davis, J. D., Winkielman, P., & Coulson, S. (2017). Sensorimotor simulation and emotion processing: Impairing facial action increases semantic retrieval demands. ''Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience'', ''17''(3), 652–664. * Van Petten, C., Coulson, S., Rubin, S., Plante, E., & Parks, M. (1999). Time course of word identification and semantic integration in spoken language. ''Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 25''(2), 394–417.

References

External links

Faculty Page at UC San Diego Cognitive Science

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Coulson, Seana Psycholinguists American women psychologists 21st-century American psychologists American cognitive neuroscientists American women neuroscientists American women academics Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Metaphor theorists University of California, San Diego faculty 21st-century American women