Ridiculously broad overview: I am primarily a cognitive psychologist interested in language: How it has evolved in human beings, how it is learned in children, and how it is used in everyday life. My research theoretically and empirically cuts across these three key time scales of language: evolution, acquisition, and usage. I am also interested in how dynamics of action -- the timing and structure of overt behavioral activity -- reflects these kinds of cognitive processes. By tracking a person's action using semi-continuous measures, you can reveal the time course of language-related cognitive processes, such as categorizing a word, or even evaluating the truth of a sentence. To conduct all this research, I have made extensive use of concepts drawn from the study of nonlinear, dynamical systems. Read below for more detail about my work. See my CV for articles you can download.
Social constraints on linguistic structure. With Gary Lupyan, IGERT fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, we are using large-scale databases about languages, their grammatical features, and demographic information to show that the structures of individual languages are partly determined by the social structure in which they're used. We are finding strong statistical evidence that language structures easier for adults to learn tend to be found in large and more populous social systems -- where adults are likely to be common learners of these structures. This work is challenging the common assumption that language structures (like grammar) are independent of the large-scale social dynamics of usage.
The dynamics of cognition: cognition-action covariation. Collaborators and I have been measuring arm trajectories, tracked using the computer mouse or lately the Nintendo Wii remote, to explore the dynamics of thought processes. We have shown that arm trajectories systematically reveal your thought processes in a variety of contexts. For example, when you think over uncertain concerns such as "Is murder justifiable?" your arm movements (measured with the computer mouse) can reveal that uncertainty (McKinstry, Dale, & Spivey, 2008). My laboratory, in collaboration with Michael Spivey at UC Merced, obtained a National Science Foundation grant to investigate an implication of this cognition-action relationship: In short, "the arm should show information acquisition." Students and I have adapted the Nintendo Wii remote to track the arm during paired-associate learning (a memory task), and have shown that arm dynamics indeed reflect learning as it proceeds (Dale, Roche, Snyder, & McCall, 2008).
The dynamics of interaction: behavioral coordination and alignment. During interaction, such as conversation, behaviors (and cognition) may be aligned or coordinated in a variety of ways. This has led some to suggest that the continuous real-time cognitive dynamics of two people become “one unit,” in the sense that they may serve as their own unit of analysis in conversation or other interaction (e.g., Shockley, Richardson, & Dale, in press). In collaborations led by Daniel Richardson at University College London, we have shown that visual attention (directed, for example, to a shared menu during appetizer selection as described above) becomes tightly synchronized through interaction (e.g., Richardson, Dale, & Kirkham, 2007). To do this, we have adapted a method from the study of noisy, nonlinear dynamical systems intended to quantify the behavioral overlap between two continuous or categorical behavioral time series (Dale & Spivey, 2006).
Pluralism in cognitive science. I also have interests in philosophical and theoretical issues in cognitive science. I have recently argued that adopting a dynamical systems approach, along with taking complex systems seriously, encourages embracing multiple theoretical frameworks across cognitive science. While I adopt a particular theoretical framework appropriate for my level of empirical analysis, namely dynamical systems (e.g., Spivey & Dale, 2006), I am wary of the assumption that this framework applies across all levels of analysis. A different perspective, that we will not achieve some unified theoretic ideal, leads to a more pluralistic approach to cognitive science (see Dale, Dietrich, & Chemero, in press, for some review). In this metatheoretical strategy, cognitive science may overcome various forms of “framework hubris” and better integrate our interdisciplinary endeavors (see also the special issue: Dale, 2008).