Lab Alum – Lang Chen

Currently

I’m Lang Chen (or “Chen Lang” if you would like to follow the conventional order in Mandarin Chinese), and a former member of Knowledge & Concepts Lab in the department of psychology at University of Wisconsin-Madison. During grad school I primarily worked with Tim Rogers on various fascinating projects in order to understand how knowledge of concepts is processed and represented in complex neural networks (both human brain and computational model). Also, I worked with Mark Seidenberg along with Tim to investigate how the meaning of words, namely, the semantic knowledge of words, is engaged in word reading and recognition across individuals with different cognitive capacities and from diverse language backgrounds.

I completed my undergrad and master training in Beijing Normal University in China, and worked with Prof. Shu Hua to investigate how the similarity and discrepancy between the native language and a second language (L2) may be manifested in the processes of word recognition and sentence comprehension in L2.

Research Interests 

As a cognitive neuroscience researcher, I am fascinated to understand how the human brain, a complex system composed of millions of neurons, achieves one of the most fundamental but sophisticated cognitive capacities — to establish a knowledge system that encodes the meanings of objects, events and words, and enables us to interact and make sense of the physical world. This knowledge system is surely acquired through extensive sensory and motor experiences with external stimuli over the life time, but at the meantime, it must relatively abstract away from the specific time and space that our direct sensory and motor experiences are grounded.

Peer-reviewed articles:

  1. Chen, L., Rogers, T. T. (accepted). Revisiting domain-general accounts of category-specificity in mind and brain. WIREs Cognitive Science.
  2. Schapiro, A., Rogers, T. T., Norman, K., Chen, L., McDevitt, E., Mednick, S. (2013). The role of sleep in consolidating semantic knowledge. Journal of Vision, 13(9), 666-666.
  3. Lei, L., Pan, J., Liu, H., McBride-Chang, C., Li, H., Zhang, Y., Chen, L., Tardif, T., Liang W., Zhang Z., Shu, H. (2011). Developmental trajectories of reading development and impairment from ages 3 to 8 years in Chinese children. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52(2), 212-220.
  4. Liu, Y., Li, P., Shu, H., Zhang, Q., & Chen, L. (2010). Structure and meaning in Chinese: An ERP study of idioms. Journal of Neurolinguistics, 23(6), 615-630.
  5. Chen, L., Rogers, T.T. (2010). Nonverbal semantic processing disrupts visual word recognition in healthy adults. In S. Ohlsson & R. Catrambone (Eds.), Proceedings of the 32nd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2194-2199). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.
  6. Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2007). ERP Signatures of Subject-Verb Agreement in L2 Learning. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 10(2), 161-174;
  7. Basnight-Brown, D. M., Chen, L., Shu H., Kostić, A., & Feldman, L. B. (2007). Monolingual and bilingual recognition of regular and irregular English verbs: Sensitivity to form similarity varies with first language experience. Journal of Memory and Language, 57, 65-80.

Conference Presentations & Talks:

  1. Chen, L., Matthew Lambon Ralph, Cloutman, L., Ishibashi, R., Rogers, T. T. (2014, April). Category-specific activation patterns arise from base connectivity: Converging evidence from functional neuroimaging, probabilistic tractography, and a neural network model. Poster will be presented at CNS 2014 Annual Meeting, Boston, USA.
  2. Chen, L., Rogers, T. T. (2012, August). Knowing where to look: Conceptual knowledge guides fixation in an object categorization task. Poster presented at 34th Annual Conference of Cognitive Science Society, Sapporo, Japan.
  3. Chen, L., Rogers, T. T. (2012, July). Graded functional connectivity explains category-specific activations with and without visual experience. Talk presented at 13th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, San Sebastian, Spain.
  4. Chen, L., Rogers, T. T. (2012, July). Becoming modular: Cognitive control affects the degree to which lexical and semantic representations interact. Poster presented at 13th Neural Computation and Psychology Workshop, San Sebastian, Spain.
  5. Chen, L., Rogers, T. T. (2010, August). Nonverbal semantic processing disrupts visual word recognition in healthy adults. Poster presented at 32nd Annual Conference of Cognitive Science Society, Portland, USA;
  6. Chen, L., Shu, H., Liu, Y., Zhao, J., & Li, P. (2006, October). ERP effects of subjective-verb agreement violations in Chinese-English Learners and native English speakers. Poster presented at 1st Conference of Sino-Western Exchanges in Cognitive Neuroscience, Beijing, China.

Awards & Honors:

2013 Shwartz Award Competition Finalist, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2012 Rumelhart Memorial Travel Award, Stanford Univerisity and 13th NCPW.
2012 Hertz Travel Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2010 Honored Instructor Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2010 Hertz Travel Award, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
2008 University Fellowship, University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Teaching Experience:

2014 Spring Cognitive Psychology. Instructor: Brad Postle.
2013 Fall Neuroses. Instructor: Jeff Henriques.
2012 Spring Introduction to Statistics. Instructor: Bryan Hendricks.
2010 Fall Experimental Psychology. Instructor: Bryan Hendricks.
2010 Spring Perception and Sensation. Instructor: Christian Stilp.