Research

My primary research interests are in building a machine that solves problems that human solve, in a mostly human-like way. More specifically, I am working on a movement of eye movement and motor control in reading that adapts to the joint constraints of task, payoff, and individual cognitive architecture. At the moment this means a model that maintains probabilistic beliefs over the possible structures of the strings it reads, and conditions its behavior based on that information to maximize some precise task goal.

In the past I have worked on understanding the emergence of langauge as a communicative system, music perception, and questions of memory interence in sentence processing. I am also a methods and methodology geek, having done work in behavioral methods, eyetracking, ERP, and MEG, as well as borrowing from the stats and AI toolbox whenever I can get away with it.

Reproducible Analysis and Literate Programming

I am a strong proponent of reproducible analysis and research. While I currently don't have the time to proactively post all my data, analysis, and simulation code here, I will provide data, analysis and simulation code for any of the below upon request, assuming it is my code (otherwise it is up to my co-authors). Moreover, I will make sure it is reasonably well-documented and do my best to help you understand it and get it running, within reason. You are invited to build on and modify my work, on the condition that modified variants are similarly shared and I get properly attributed.

Publications and Presentations

Lewis, R. L., Shvartsman, M., and Singh, S. (to appear). The adaptive nature of eye-movements in linguistic tasks: How payoff and architecture shape speed-accuracy tradeoffs. Topics in Cognitive Science.

Shvartsman, M., Lewis, R. L., and Singh, S. (2013). A New Account of Spillover Effects in Reading Evidence from Parafoveal Masking. Poster to be presented at the 26th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Shvartsman, M., Lewis, R., and Singh, S. (2012). The adaptive nature of eye-movement control in linguistic tasks. Talk given at the 25th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing

Shvartsman, M., Lewis, R., Singh, S., Smith, M., and Bartek, B. (2011). Predicting Task Performance from Individual Variation in Eye-Movement Control Strategies. Poster presented at the 24th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing.

Bratman, J., Shvartsman, M., Lewis, R. L., and Singh, S. (2010). A new approach to exploring language emergence as boundedly optimal control in the face of environmental and cognitive constraints. In Salvucci, D. and Gunzelmann, G., editors, Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Cognitive Modeling

Bergelson, E., Shvartsman, M., Idsardi, W., (2010). Differences in Brain Responses to Vowels and Musical Intervals. Talk given at the International Conference for Music Perception and Cognition, Seattle, Aug 2010

Shvartsman, M., Bergelson, E., Idsardi, W.. (2009). From Tones To Vowels: A Neurophysiological Investigation of Sine and Formant Dyads. Poster presented at the Neurobiology of Language Conference. Chicago, IL. Oct 2009