As a young French master’s student who was not very comfortable with English, reading Larry’s seminal 1999 paper was quite a challenge. It was neither the shortest nor the easiest paper to digest, yet it profoundly influenced my academic journey. This work was decisive in choosing the direction of my master’s thesis, and it shaped […]
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A harsh review can sometimes feel like a wrecking ball to one’s work, and, as academic lore has it, it’s often ‘Reviewer 2’ who wields the ball. However, a critical review I received in the late 1990s became a turning point in my research, thanks to Larry Barsalou’s (1999) groundbreaking article on perceptual symbol systems. […]
Writing tributes isn’t my strongest suit, but when it comes to Larry, I’ll just tell it like it is (and no, this isn’t an endorsement of Donald Trump). I’ve spent most of my academic career immersed in Psycholinguistics and Cognitive Science. My primary focus has always been on what some might consider the more mundane […]
During my postdoctoral years, I decided to attend a small, niche conference to delve deeper into a specific area of neuroscience. I didn’t know anyone, so I was grateful to meet another postdoc who also found themself on the fringe. As we bonded, he shared a saying that has stuck with me: “there are people […]
When you are as thoughtful, intellectually curious, and gracious as Larry Barsalou is, you can inspire others without even knowing it. While I have never been lucky enough to work with Larry closely as a mentee or a colleague, my career would not be what it is today without his personal influence. To understand Larry’s […]
I am extremely happy to be part of a tribute for Larry Barsalou. Having worked on word meaning, concepts, and related issues for a number of years, Larry’s ideas have strongly influenced me, just like they continue to influence a large number of young and older researchers. Larry’s work on ad hoc concepts, embodied/grounded cognition, […]
Larry Barsalou is brilliant. In my view, he made one of the most important scientific discoveries in the modern era of psychological science: ad hoc concepts. It is not hyperbole to say that my own scientific efforts, in part, owe their existence to Larry’s discovery of ad hoc concepts. Before Larry’s seminal work, a category […]
In the mid-1990’s, I was extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to explore how conceptual/semantic information was represented in the human brain. One of these studies, published in Science in 1995, focused on the neural systems underpinning retrieval of information about the object-associated color and action, the other, published in Nature in 1996, focused on […]
This Digital Event focuses on the scientific contributions of Lawrence Barsalou (pictured below). Articles in this Digital Event: Digital Event honoring Larry Barsalou — Still grounded after all these years Larry Barsalou – enthusiasm, flexibility, and depth Formidable, flexible, friendly, and fun Grounding concepts in the brain Ad hoc concepts as a fundamental operating principle […]
We have known Larry for a long time. At first it was a one-way affair, when we were in graduate school and read his work. After we studied Larry’s paper on ad-hoc categories our view on semantic memory was never the same again. We had been working on the boundary between episodic and semantic memory, […]