Duane Girard Watson (born 1976) is an American neuroscientist and professor of psychology and human development at Vanderbilt University.
He holds the Frank W. Mayborn Chair in Cognitive Science and leads the Vanderbilt University Communication and Language Laboratory.
Here he joined the laboratory of Ted Gibson in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
[5][6] He joined the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in 2005, where he established a laboratory that investigates the cognitive processes that underpin language and nonverbal communication.
[9] As part of this effort, Watson designed an experiment where participants listened to Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.
[9] He showed that disfluencies did not only provide more time for processing, but also helped people interpret what they were hearing.
[9] In 2016 Watson joined Vanderbilt University, where he leads the Communication and Language Laboratory (CaLL).
[5] He serves as Associate Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.
[5] Watson founded the SPARK society, an organisation that looks to support scientists of colour to become innovators in cognitive science.