Education
He received a bachelor"s degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from Stanford University in 1981.
He received a bachelor"s degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977, and a Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology from Stanford University in 1981.
His doctoral advisor was Gordon Bower. Since then, Barsalou has previously held faculty positions at the Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago. Since 2015, he has been professor of psychology at the University of Glasgow.
His work addresses the nature of human knowledge, and its roles in perception, memory, language, and thought.
The current theme of his research is that the human conceptual system is grounded in the brain’s modality-specific systems Specific topics of interest include whether (and if so, how) modality-specific systems implement symbolic operations and abstract concepts, which is one of the main tasks of current cognitive psychology.
Barsalou has endeavored to explain representations in terms of the different modalities of experience, a process termed “grounding” cognition. One of the key processes in Barsalou’s view is multimodal simulation, which, he proposes, constitutes grounded representations.