Hi there 🔆

Nelu Radpour is a Cognition and Cognitive Neuroscience PhD Candidate and a member of the Learning, Memory and Language Lab in the Department of Psychology at Florida State University, working with Dr. Michael Kaschak. Her research examines how people learn, generalize, and integrate new knowledge, with a particular focus on the embodied nature of cognition and the factors that shape flexibility in learning. She uses a mixed-methods approach that includes experimental studies, computational modeling, and quantitative techniques to study both individual learning and the dynamics of social interaction. She is also interested in the interplay between human learning and artificial intelligence and how comparisons between the two can better inform our understanding of cognition.

Previously, she studied cognitive and information science at the University of Colorado Boulder, where she worked with Dr. Michael Paul. Her past work looked at how we can leverage machine learning to better model language and social dynamics like gesture recognition for sign language and the spread of health information. After that, she spent a couple of years as a preschool teacher, both at a Montessori and a forest kindergarten, which deepened her interest in how people acquire knowledge and led her to shift her focus toward the mechanisms that support learning. And long before that, she earned her BA from the University of Texas at Austin in linguistics, where she first learned how vector space models can serve as proxies for our thoughts, forever sparking her passion for language, cognition, and computation. 😄