Marcel Just

We are very pleased to have Marcel A. Just as an invited speaker for the 1997 CSBBCS / SCCCSC meeting. Marcel Just is a very accomplished and acclaimed researcher of language processes, working memory resources, problem solving, and other fundamental problems of cognition. With Pat Carpenter, he was co-editor of the Journal of Memory and Language during the 1980s. His recent work encompasses the neuroscientific realm, as evidenced by his 1995 Psychonomics symposium address, "Working memory and working brain." s

Research questions that Just has addressed include:

How do we come to understand how an object works when we inspect it or understand a situation when we read about it?
Do we measure our understanding in terms of visual images or language?
How are the computational and storage resources of working memory coordinated to do the understanding?

Just has described his own research as follows:

Our research examines a variety of "understanding" processes involving visual thinking, language comprehension, and problem-solving processes. To find out what goes on in a person's mind during such thinking, our lab uses several methodologies, such as reaction time studies, verbal protocol analysis, and eye movement monitoring during comprehension and visual thinking. The experiments determine the nature of the on-line psychological processes that occur during understanding and thinking. The research examines the thinking of both normal subjects as well as patients with brain damage, to determine the organization of the underlying cognitive mechanisms. The various performance measures are used to construct theoretical models, often expressed in computational terms, that perform the same task and exhibit similar performance characteristics as human subjects.
The specific topics that our research addresses include sentence and text comprehension, coordinated comprehension of text and diagrams, and the role of working memory in comprehension and problem-solving. The topics in visual cognition include visual problem-solving, mental kinematics, and mental models of dynamic events. In addition to studying various kinds of understanding, we also examine why individuals differ in the strategies and cognitive resources that they bring to bear on a task, attempting to explain why some people are better thinkers than others.

Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1987). _The psychology of reading and language comprehension_. Newton, MA: Allyn and Bacon.
Just, M. A., & Carpenter, P. A. (1992). A capacity theory of comprehension: Individual differences in working memory. _Psychological Review_, _99_, 122-149.
Hegarty, M., & Just, M. A. (1993). Constructing mental models of machines from text and diagrams. _Journal of Memory and Language_.