Parsons, Professor Lawrence

Language

http://www.shef.ac.uk/psychology/staff/academic/lawrence-parsons.html

My research is primarily concerned with the functional brain organisation in humans.

Brain function during performance Specific areas my colleagues and I work on include studying the brain basis of piano performance, singing, harmonizing, conducting, and improvising music, and as well as dancing. Likewise, we have compared music to language in comparable performances, including the neural basis of pitch perception.

Cognitive function in reasoning We are studying the cognitive and neural basis of deductive and probabilistic reasoning, in some cases in order to clarify the relation of such systems to those for language, mathematics, etc. We are investigating the cognitive illusions of estimation.

Analysis of activity patterns We are exploring analyses of activity patterns measured in functional magnetic resonance for the internal structure of natural conceptual categories, and for object and predicate pairs composing propositions. We have been studying possible non-motor function(s) of the cerebellum.