Patricia Carpenter

Who is Patricia Carpenter?

Patricia Carpenter is Lee and Marge Gregg Professor of Psychology at Carnegie Mellon University. Her research focuses on the organization of the cognitive systems in immediate thought, for example, the processes that underlie problem solving and sentence comprehension. Her specific interest is in how these processes are organized, what constrains them, and how their functional organization relates to their cortical representation. To address these questions, she uses functional imaging studies of people while they perform complex cognitive tasks and relates the imaging data to more traditional behavioral studies of cognition and computational models. In addition, her research extends to understanding how language comprehension and problem solving are approached by individuals with unusual characteristics, including those who have had a stroke or who have autism.

In recent years, Carpenter has begun to explore the field of embodied cognition through her research. Her primary starting point is a biologically-grounded account of cognition called the 'fractal catalytic model.' In this model, it is proposed that, to understand the mind/brain relation, one should first explore 'what is life' and what enables a living process to persist as an organized entity; this exploration deepens and changes our understanding of cognition and provides a new framework for the mind-brain relation.