2018.11.05 Dr. Tao Gong

Professor and Head of Ancient DNA Lab

Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

Computational Research in Psychology and Linguistics

In this talk, I review two computational methods used in psychology and linguistics, namely data science and computational modeling. For the data science method, I introduce two examples of using it in psychology research: studying the influence of individual differences in reading behaviors as gauged by eye-tracking measures, and extracting the correlation between social media like Facebook languages and social media users psychological status like satisfaction with life. For the computational modeling approach, I introduce one example of using agent-based model to study the relative importance of perceptual constraints on colors and socio-cultural transmissions to the universality of linguistic color categorization across languages. These examples demonstrate the multidisciplinary nature of psychology and linguistics research.