Title

Professor
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts

E-mail

spivey@ucmerced.edu

Office Phone

(209) 228-7742

Website

faculty1.ucmerced.edu/spivey

Address

University of California, Merced
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
5200 North Lake Rd.
Merced, CA 95343

Research Interests

Professor Spivey's research interests include:

• Interaction between language and vision
• Sentence processing
• Word recognition
• Visual attention
• Visual memory
• Eye movements
• Computational modeling

Using an eyetracker and simultaneously recording the streaming x,y coordinates of the subject's computer mouse movements, he gets an online measure of some of the probabilistic representations (or "tentative interpretations") that get computed in real-time as the subject attempts to integrate various sources of visual and/or linguistic information.

One finding from this study is that spoken word recognition and syntactic parsing are immediately influenced by relevant visual context — thus compromising strict modular theories of language processing. This, and related, work is described in his book, The Continuity of Mind (2007).

Education

• Ph.D., 1996 — University of Rochester
• M.A., 1995 — University of Rochester
• B.A., 1991 — University of California, Santa Cruz