I’m pleased to introduce you to the Psychonomic Society’s newest Science Communication intern, Daniel Pfaff (pictured below). He’ll be joining Hannah Mechtenberg for the next six months, working with our Digital Content team and writing posts on research conducted by our members and published in the Society’s journals. We are delighted they will be part of the team.
You may already know Daniel if you followed @Psychonomic_Soc during the Psychonomic Society’s last annual meeting. He, along with a couple of other Xnomes (formerly known as Twitternomes), took over the Society’s X account to share happenings during the meeting. I interviewed Daniel so we can get to know him before reading his posts. You can follow Daniel on X (@DPfaffenhoffen) and read his posts on our featured content site. Here’s Daniel:
What’s your area of research?
I have always found language fascinating; it’s something we all have in common yet simultaneously unique to every person. Specifically, I am interested in the ways that the brain comprehends and processes multiple languages or language varieties at the same time. I ask questions like “How are code-switches processed in the brain?” and “How do multilinguals store information from their languages?”. Hopefully, this reveals some insights that can help people learn languages easier, faster, and more efficiently.
More recently, my research has delved into different ways of measuring the costs of code-switching. The co-registration of electroencephalography (EEG) and eye-tracking methods can help us draw connections between these separate methodologies and understand how the brain works in a more holistic way. It’s been exciting to use them in the same experiment and apply them to bilingual language research.
What’s the most exciting concept in cognitive science?
I am quite biased towards cognitive science research about language, and the recent surge in artificial intelligence language models (and their exposure to the general public) has been on my mind a lot! Language is an inherently human skill, and I find it fascinating that we can often weed out AI language, even when we can’t articulate why it sounds bad. As cognitive scientists, we are capable of discovering how AI language models fail, but enabling them to understand and produce non-literal sentences like metaphors seems to be an interesting problem.
As these AI language models get better, I think it will be interesting to see how society adapts to being able to produce large amounts of text easily. How do our expectations for students change when AI can generate entire essays? How can these tools help expand accessibility for all people? How can we, as consumers, continue to distinguish between AI-generated and human-generated content? However intimidating these rapid advancements may be, I am generally optimistic about the future of AI language models and their implementation.
What’s the most critical unsolved challenge or unanswered question for cognitive scientists?
Despite all we know about how the brain works, there is still so much we don’t know about how information is stored in networks of neurons. We know that certain areas of the brain have specific roles, like Broca’s area and speech production, but ultimately we drew imaginary lines in the brain and called them separate areas. There is a whole other magnitude of complexity in the brain at the level of individual neurons and their connections that we might never understand! As our methods of neural imaging improve, it will be interesting to see how additional details make these interactions clear.
What drew you to science communication?
Like many others in this new generation of academics, I watched YouTube science communicators like ASAPScience, Crash Course, and Veritasium. I appreciated how these creators, especially those with a formal scientific background, were able to communicate complicated ideas effectively. As I started reading more academic journals, I felt that some academics often wrote in a very unapproachable and, in fact, esoteric way. I believe that there is a way to precisely communicate research for an academic audience while refraining from needlessly complex language and without sacrificing the truth. Especially now that many of us have opportunities to communicate directly with many different types of audiences, we need to spend time thinking about how we can communicate effectively. I am excited to join the Psychonomics Society in its mission of science communication!
Is there anything else you want us to know about you?
Anyone who knows me knows I am a proud Kansas Citian (KCMO, that is). That said, I am a big traveler and appreciate the opportunities I’ve had to live in different parts of the United States and abroad. There is something special about seeing new places!