Penny Pexman is interested in how people think. An internationally recognized leader in the field of cognitive psychology, this unrelenting curiosity serves Pexman equally well as Western’s vice-president (research).
This summer, Pexman visited the renowned Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics to connect with leaders at one of Western’s key international academic partners. While there, she wore two hats – one as a researcher invited to give a talk, and the other as a senior leader looking to forge bonds between Western and institutions around the world.
The Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is based at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands, where Western has already built a strong relationship with the Donders Centre for Neuroscience. Pexman believes there are important lessons to learn from global partners like Radboud, which is also known for its strong research output. It is consistently ranked in the top 150 universities in the world by four major university ranking tables.
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (de verBeelding)
Western’s agreement with Radboud is supported in large part by the Radboud-Western Collaboration Fund that provides money for one-year joint projects and short-term mobility visits.
“The partnership with Radboud is mutually beneficial. It has catalyzed collaborations that probably wouldn’t have happened otherwise and look like they have legs in terms of spinning off into other opportunities,” said Pexman. “Though it has largely grown organically with the researchers taking the lead, it’s a real model for what can be achieved and what we want to do strategically with other groups on campus.”
Pexman believes international collaboration, like Western’s partnership with Radboud, is vital to achieving Western’s goals on the global stage, including driving change through research and educating global citizens as outlined in the Western in the World global engagement plan.
“International collaboration enriches research in so many ways,” said Pexman. “As vice-president (research), I want to make internal funding available for more international opportunities. And I think targeting institutes, like the Pasteur Institute in France or any of the Max Plancks, is a great opportunity because there are many of them, in diverse areas of research, and they are completely research intensive.”
There are more than 80 Max Planck Institutes in the world, mostly located in Germany, focused on basic research in life sciences, natural sciences and social and human sciences. These world-class facilities are independent and autonomous.
Working with Lily Cho, vice-provost and associate vice-president (international), Pexman wants to build upon the renowned strength and excellence of Western’s own institutes and cultivate new global partnerships to further strengthen the university’s internationalization goals for greater impact in the world.
“There is already a capacity for partnership that our institutes have that I want to capitalize on,” said Pexman. “Now, we want to find those sister organizations, externally, that could provide further inspiration and mutually beneficial collaboration.”
Currently, Western boasts four research institutes: the Bone and Joint Institute, the Institute for Earth and Space Exploration, the Rotman Institute of Philosophy and the Western Institute for Neuroscience.
Deriving meaning from language
A three-time Western graduate, Pexman (BA‘92, MA’93, PhD’98) says the opportunity to speak at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as researcher was a career highlight.
Pexman delivered a talk about her latest findings in the field of semantics – the study of meaning in language. “In my field, the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics is world-leading,” said Pexman. “This was a peak professional moment because it’s such an impressive environment with everyone totally focused on the research.”
Pexman is interested in how we derive meaning from language and how those processes are changed by damage or experience. An award-winning researcher and mentor, Pexman has published more than 150 journal articles and book chapters on these topics.
“I am passionate about understanding how we think and one of the central ways we think is through language,” said Pexman, a psychology professor with research funded by Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC). “Our social experience and our ways of understanding the world, largely come through language.”
Pexman splits her research between studying language acquisition in children (how they learn to understand the world through language) and language understanding in adults (how they remember, retrieve and think about concepts using language).
“Researchers in my field have some understanding about how children acquire words for things they can directly experience through their senses. That’s a little bit easier to understand because as children physically experience something they can put labels to it,” said Pexman. “The more complicated questions, and the ones that we’ve been diving into lately, are about how we learn labels for abstract concepts, that we can’t experience through our senses, but which later make up more than half of the adult lexicon.”
For pre-school children, less than 10 per cent of vocabulary is related to abstract concepts, yet by adolescence, abstract words make up about half of vocabulary. Pexman says language acquisition is more straightforward when it comes to labelling concrete items like ‘dog’ or ‘cat’ and even elements that require experience and perception like numbers and colours. Language acquisition becomes more complex when the concepts are abstract, such as terms like truth and justice.
“There are a number of learning mechanisms at play, and we are working on trying to understand that,” said Pexman. “There is likely human bias involved to attend to concrete things that are perceptible and present first, rather than abstract ideas you can’t actually grasp or see, and yet those concepts are so important to the human experience.”
Pexman and her collaborators are now tracking variability in language understanding right into adulthood, which is relatively new territory for the field of semantics.
“There is an assumption, particularly in cognitive science, that everyone fundamentally has the same cognitive system, and we just need to understand that system to predict behaviour and learning. The reality is, there’s more variability between individuals, in terms of how they understand the world, than we have previously understood,” said Pexman. “Individual differences are no longer a backwater of cognitive science. They have become a focus to address some of the key questions that remain.”
