Shawn N. Cummings, Ph.D. (he/him)

I am interested in how experience shapes the way we perceive stimuli in our environment—my research program focuses on the cognitive mechanisms underlying adaptation, specifically during speech perception. As each new talker we encounter produces their words differently, How do we nevertheless easily and robustly understand one another?

Progress in this domain is constrained—in my estimation—not by a paucity of explanations, but by the opposite. Dozens of potentially compatible proposals exist at the level of ‘verbal’ theories, running the gamut from low-level signal normalization to changes in task-dependent post perceptual decision biases. However, these proposals often make different implicit assumptions and lack the computational specificity to be formally evaluated/compared. My current focus is in developing models that deliver clear, quantitative predictions thatcanbe evaluated using standard goodness-of-fit metrics.

My work brings a breadth of perspective, with formal training across disciplines including linguistics, psychology, and the neurobiology of language. My research combines approaches from behavioral psychophysics, computational modeling, and cognitive neuroscience.

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in Language Science at the University of California, Irvine, working primarily with Drs. Xin Xie and Chigusa Kurumada.

Recent news/presentations:

May 2026: A novel paradigm for rapid determination of listener specific phonetic boundaries presented at the Acoustical Society of America annual meeting.

March 2026: Cumulative input sensitivity predicts both attenuation and stability of lexically guided perceptual learning published in Psychonomic Review & Bulletin.