Rachel Ryskin

RachelR

Education
2016 – PhD in Cognitive Psychology, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
2010 – BA in Cognitive Science, Northwestern University

Current Projects
The contents of a communicated message are often corrupted by noise, for instance, when the speaker makes an error; yet, listeners are remarkably adept at inferring the intended meaning, in part because they have some representation of what that noise is likely to be. In current work, I aim to clarify the mechanisms by which listeners adapt their comprehension system to account for different types of noise and to examine whether this process differs in persons with aphasia.

Publications
Ryskin, R. Futrell, R., Kiran, S., & Gibson, E. (2018). Comprehenders model the nature of noise in the environment. Cognition, 181. 141-150. Preregistration Challenge Winner [OSF project] [Manuscript PDF]
Ryskin, R., Qi, Z., Covington, N. V., Duff, M., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2018). Knowledge and learning of verb biases in amnesia. Brain and Language, 180-182. 62–83. [Manuscript PDF]
Ryskin, R. A. & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2017). The malleability of linguistic representations poses a challenge to the priming-based experimental approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 40, E309. [Commentary on Branigan & Pickering (2017), An Experimental Approach to Linguistic Representation.]
Ryskin, R. A., Qi, Z., Duff, M., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2017). Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning.Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 43. 781-794.
Ryskin, R. A., Wang, R. F., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2016). Listeners use speaker identity to access representations of spatial perspective during online language comprehension. Cognition, 147, 75-84.
Ryskin, R. A., Benjamin, A. S., Tullis, J. & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2015). Perspective-taking in comprehension, production, and memory: an individual differences approach. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General,144, 898-915.
Ryskin, R. A., Yoon, S., & Brown-Schmidt (2015). Language, Memory, and Perspectives, in Emerging Trends in the Social and Behavioral Sciences (eds.) Robert Scott and Stephen Kosslyn, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons. DOI: 10.1002/9781118900772.etrds0200
Brown-Schmidt, S., Yoon, S., & Ryskin, R. A. (2015). People as Contexts in Conversation. In B. H. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 62, pp. 59-99. San Diego, CA: Elsevier Academic Press.
Ryskin, R. A., Brown-Schmidt, S., Canseco-Gonzalez, E., Yiu, L., & Nguyen, E. (2014). Visuospatial perspective-taking in conversation and the role of bilingual experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 74, 46-76. doi: 10.1016/j.jml.2014.04.003
Ryskin, R. A. & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2014). Do adults show a curse of knowledge in false-belief reasoning? A robust estimate of the true effect size. PLoS ONE, 9(3): e92406. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0092406
Rapp, D.N., Hinze, S.R., Kohlhepp, K., & Ryskin, R.A. (2014). Reducing reliance on inaccurate information. Memory & Cognition, 42, 11-26. doi: 10.3758/s13421-013-0339-0
Ryskin, R.A. & Brown-Schmidt, S. (2011). The impact of gender and bilingualism on cognition: the case of spatial perspective-taking. Proceedings of the 15th annual workshop on the semantics and pragmatics of dialogue (SemDial), Los Angeles, CA.

Recent Presentations

“Recent psycholinguistic theories propose that comprehenders integrate prior world and language knowledge with a model of potential noise to infer the intended meaning of a sentence. This framework has been proposed to account for failures to use syntactic cues in persons with aphasia (PWA). We find that PWA make more inferences overall than controls suggesting they expect a higher rate of noise and they do not appear to modulate the rates of inferences based on the amount of noise in the input.”