Dr Bruce Stevenson
Lecturer, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences
Qualifications
B.Sc. (Honours) Monash University; Ph.D. Monash University
Contact
| Email: | bstevens@une.edu.au |
| Room: | S6 Room 48 |
| Phone: | 02 6773 2565 (or +61 2 6773 2565 overseas) |
| Fax: | 02 6773 3820 |
Areas of Teaching
PSYC 206 Cognitive Psychology
PSYC 4th Year Reading Course: The Nature of Mind
Research interests
How is it that the lines on this page can induce your present meaningful experience? What is this thing called mind that allows you to have conscious experiences, to act, and to identify yourself as separate from the rest of the world? Presumably the chair on which you are sitting, or floor on which you are standing, is not similarly endowed. At a general level, these are the sorts of questions that I am interested in: What is mental activity, and what conditions need to prevail in order for it to occur? At a more specific level, language processing offers a rich medium through which to investigate these issues: What mental activity is happening at this very moment, involving the use of different types of information, which results in your current comprehension of what I have written? The products of language processing are available to your conscious perusal in a working memory: Do the properties of working memory constrain that which we can be aware of? If so, what are the implications? Both language processes and working memory are aspects of cognition common to most humans, but what happens when there is an apparent breakdown in cognitive processing? A phenomenon such as autism might be the result. Investigations into autism offer better treatment for those afflicted, and provide insights into aspects of ourselves that we tend to take for granted.
Supervision Areas
Representative Publications
Stevenson, B. (1999). A Case Study in Information Processing: Sentence Processing. In J. Wiles and T. Dartnall (Eds.). Perspectives on Cognitive Science II: Theories, experiments and foundations (Chapter 16). Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation.
Stevenson, B. (1999). Assumptions of transparency between mental activity and behaviour. Edited conference proceedings (CD-ROM), for the Fourth Conference of the Australasian Cognitive Science Society.
Forster, K.I., & Stevenson, B. (1987). Sentence matching and well-formedness. Cognition, 26, 171-186.