Looking Forward @ Johns Hopkins: Barbara Landau

Description

Barbara Landau will be presenting this week's lecture, "Unforgettable: When an Amnesic Artist Remembers."

Barbara Landau is the Dick and Lydia Todd Professor of Cognitive Science. She served as the Vice Provost for Faculty at Johns Hopkins University from 2011-2014, and as the Director of the Science of Learning Institute from 2013-2018. She leads the Language and Cognition Lab, which focuses on the nature and development of human knowledge of space and language.

Landau is interested in human knowledge of language and space, and the relationships between these two foundational systems of knowledge. She examines questions about how the two systems work together to enhance human cognition and whether one is foundational to the other. Her central interests concern the nature of the cognitive "primitives" that are in place during early development, and support our remarkable capacity to recognize objects, move around space in a directed fashion, and talk about our spatial experience. Although much of her work concerns the mechanisms of normal development, Landau is also interested in unusual cases of development. She is a leading authority on language and spatial information in people with Williams syndrome, a genetic deficit associated with deletion of 25 genes on chromosome 7, which can shed light on the effects of genetic deletion on spatial organization and language learning. Landau investigates how cases of unusual development can shed light on the relationships among genes, the developing brain, and cognition.

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