I am interested in understanding human semantic memory; that is, our knowledge about the meanings of words, objects, and events. Specifically, I would like to understand how semantic knowledge is stored and represented in the mind and brain, how it is acquired throughout development, how semantic tasks are performed by healthy adults and experts, and how semantic knowledge degrades in dementia.

I address these questions using computer models and empirical investigation with healthy and brain-damaged populations. In work with Jay McClelland I have used a simple feed-forward connectionist model to illustrate how the principles of parallel distributed processing (PDP) can make sense of a range of empirical phenomena from the domains of conceptual development, normal and disturbed adult semantic cognition, expertise, and "theory-theory." This work was published in a book from MIT Press. With Karalyn Patterson at the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, and Matthew Lambon Ralph at the University of Manchester, I have conducted empirical work investigating the breakdown of semantic memory in different neuropsychological disorders. With Cathy Price at the Functional Imaging Lab in London, UK, I have done some funtional imaging work to determine how patterns of brain activation seen in the temporal lobes during semantic tasks might reflect the similarity structure of visual and semantic representations.

Most recently I have been interested to better understand how various methods from machine learning might provide hypotheses about the cognitive and neural bases of knowledge acquisition. Some of this work has involved the development of semi-supervised models of human category learning with Jerry Zhu; and models of active learning, perception, saliency, and network discovery with Rob Nowak and Keith Kluender.

For information about my current projects, please visit my lab website.

Some sample publications

Kalish, C. W., Rogers, T. T., Lang, J. and Zhu, X. (2011). Can semi-supervised learning explain incorrect beliefs about categories? Cognition,120(1), 106-118.

Stilp, C. E., Rogers, T. T., & Kluender, K. (2010). Rapid efficient encoding of correlated complex acoustic properties. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(50), 21914-21919.

McClelland, J. L., Botvinick, M. B., Noelle, D., Rogers, T. T., Seidenberg, M., and Smith, L. (2010). Letting structure emerge: connectionist and dynamic systems approaches to cognition, Trends in Cognitive Science, 14, 348-356.

Rogers, T. T. and McClelland, J. L. (2008). A précis of Semantic Cognition: A Parallel Distributed Processing Approach. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 689-714.

Rogers, T. T. and Patterson, K. (2007) Object categorization: Reversals and explanations of the basic-level advantage. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General , 136(3), 451-469.

Zhu, X., Rogers, T. T., Qian, R., & Kalish, C. (2007). Humans perform semi-supervised classification too. Proceedings of the Twenty-Second AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence.

Rogers, T. T. , Hocking, J., Noppeney, U., Mechelli, A., Gorno-Tempini, M., Patterson, K. and Price, C. (2006). The anterior temporal cortex and semantic memory: Reconciling findings from neuropsychology and functional imaging. Cognitive, Affective and Behavioral Neuroscience, 6(3), 201-213.

Rogers, T. T. , Hocking, J., Mechelli, A., Patterson, K. and Price, C. (2005). Fusiform activation to animals is driven by the process, not the stimulus. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(3), 434-445.

Rogers , T. T. , Lambon Ralph, M. A, Garrard, P., Bozeat, S., McClelland, J. L., Hodges, J. R., and Patterson, K. (2004). The structure and deterioration of semantic memory: A neuropsychological and computational investigation. Psychological Review, 111(1), 205-235.