Lawrence W. Barsalou (born November 3, 1951) is an American psychologist and a cognitive scientist, currently working at the University of Glasgow.
He has held a Guggenheim fellowship, served as the chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and won an award for graduate teaching from the University of Chicago.
[2] Barsalou's research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, and health cognition.
In line with previous work by Rosch et al. (1976),[4] properties of items within the environment are not independent, but rather certain attributes tend to co-occur within specific categories.
Thus, Barsalou (1991)[5] posited that ad hoc category members would not necessarily share many features (i.e., bathing suit, money, toothpaste), but would nevertheless be members of the same ad hoc category because they similarly satisfy the requirements of the current behavioral goal of things to pack for vacation.
This work has been exceptionally influential within the study of categories, and has played a large role in illuminating the flexibility of semantic relatedness and the influence of specific behavioral goals on short and long-term conceptual representations.
[6][7][8] According to traditional cognitive theory, semantic memory is represented in an amodal format and is distinct from the low-level perceptual processes used to encode information from the surrounding environment.
He has gone on to use a grounded approach to diverse areas within cognitive psychology, including conceptual representations, attitudes, emotion, prejudice, mindfulness, and eating behaviors.
Barsalou suggests that attentional mechanisms then bind these diverse perceptual components into stable networks of associations, termed simulators, which are then stored in long-term memory.
Moreover, these simulators are not limited to specific types of entities, but can be used to represent objects, events, actions, introspections, and relational properties.
In recent years, Barsalou has begun applying this grounded approach to topics within affective and health cognition.
Barsalou has contributed research to the area of mindfulness, especially in regards to how it may serve to interrupt maladaptive on-line cognitive processing.
Assuming a grounded approach, they posited that encountering attractive stimuli engages reward simulations, which may then be enhanced by a given motivational state.