School of Psychology

My research interests can be divided into two areas: human concept learning and use; and the study of pragmatics in language comprehension. Concepts allow us to group together past experiences and generalize our learning to novel objects and events. Without concepts, every object in the environment would be new and perplexing. My own research investigates how our background knowledge interacts with the acquisition of new concepts, and how concept acquisition might differ across different subgroups of the population.

The question of how prior knowledge guides the acquisition of new information has also influenced my research into language comprehension. When we engage in communication, we do not hear sentences in isolation from what has gone on before in the discourse, nor in isolation from our knowledge of who the speaker is, what they know etc. Rather, the sentence is made in the context of a set of assumptions about what the speaker knows and what they might be trying to communicate. My interest is in how these assumptions guide the type of inferences that people make during communication.

Selected Publications

Bott, L., Hoffman, A. and Murphy, G. L. (in press). Blocking in Category Learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

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Kilner, J. K., Bott, L., & Posada, A. (2005). Dynamic oscillatory activity in the human brain mediates event prediction. European Journal of Neuroscience, 21, 2547-2554.

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Bott, L., & Noveck, I. (2004) Some utterances are underinformative: The onset and time course of scalar inference. Journal of Memory and Language, 51, 437-457.

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Heit, E., Briggs, J., & Bott, L. (2004) Modelling the effects of prior knowledge on learning incongruent features of category members. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. 30, 1065-1081.

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