Nozari Receives Early Career Award

The American Psychological Association (APA) has awarded Nazbanou (Bonnie) Nozari an award for Distinguished Scientific Early Career Contributions to Psychology, in the area of human cognition and learning. The APA cited Nozari for her "incisive experimental studies of impaired and unimpaired speakers and developing computational models of the production process [to discover] how errors in production are detected and corrected. More generally, her work provides a fresh look at how attention and control modulate language use and demonstrates the applicability of domain general computational principles of cognition to the activities of speaking, writing and typing." "Dr. Nozari's unique interdisciplinary approach to cognition and language production combines neuropsychological testing with cutting-edges cognitive models of language processing," said Michael Tarr , the Kavčić-Moura Professor of Cognitive and Brain Science and head of the Department of Psychology. "The breadth of her work and her interest in connecting language production to other cognitive mechanisms gives our program and Dietrich College a world-class foundation from which to study human language." Nozari, associate professor of psychology in the Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences , has focused her research on how the brain translates abstract thoughts into words and sentences. "You could think of [human cognition] as having unique procedures in each domain (visual processing, language processing, etc.) or you could think of the brain as having a basic set of super-computations that apply across domains and lead to what looks like efficient specialized cognition," said Nozari.