People > Faculty

Nancy S. Kim
Assistant Professor
125 Nightingale
(617) 373-3060 (office)
(617) 373-8714 (fax)
n.kim@neu.edu

• See curriculum vitae ( pdf )
• Visit Causal Cognition Lab Web site

Research

My research focuses on causal reasoning, categorization, and decision making. Our lab group asks two major questions: first, how our causal and explanatory knowledge is mentally represented and organized, and second, how this representation affects basic cognitive processes such as categorization, reasoning, and memory. Previous research suggests that concepts are represented as abstract theories (e.g., theories about schizophrenia in general), yet other evidence also shows that concepts contain information tied to specific exemplars or instances (e.g., a patient with schizophrenia whom you saw yesterday). One line of my research program asks how these two types of information fit together in a coherent model of knowledge representation. The second seeks to uncover how causal knowledge representation affects categorization processes. This line of research seeks to map out specific and reliable mechanisms whereby a person's causal theories of a concept influence categorization decisions. In addition, we investigate how the causal structure of knowledge influences reasoning, feature recognition, and feature recall.

I am also interested in how these questions about basic categorization and thinking processes are relevant to highly complex real-world tasks such as diagnostic reasoning. Thus, our lab group examines these processes in lay people, patients, and expert and novice clinicians, with both artificial concepts developed for highly controlled studies and with real-world concepts (e.g., as used in clinical settings when diagnosing and reasoning about patients and illness). We also investigate how these issues in categorization theory may be relevant to other types of person categorization, including person perception.

Frequently Taught Courses

Cognition
Seminar in Cognition
Graduate Proseminar in Cognition