Alan W Kersten

General Research Interests

My research investigates how people learn to use language to convey information about perceived events. This research investigates language learning in both children and adults, with the goal of understanding how children and adults differ in their language learning competencies and language learning strategies. A better understanding of these differences could allow for the creation of better techniques for training adults to use a second language. As part of this general goal of understanding how people learn to represent events in language, my research also examines the nature of event representations in nonlinguistic cognition. A better understanding of the mapping between event representations in language and in nonlinguistic cognition could allow for a better understanding of why some aspects of language learning are relatively easy (because they can be directly mapped onto nonlinguistic cognitive representations) and why some aspects of language learning are very difficult (because no such direct mappings are possible).

Publications and Refereed Conference Proceedings

Earles, J.L., Kersten, A.W., Más, B.B., & Miccio, D.M. (in press). Influences of activity difficulty and time pressure on age differences in activity recall. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences.

Kersten, A.W., & Earles, J.L. (2004). Semantic context influences memory for verbs more than memory for nouns. Memory & Cognition, 32, 198-211.

Kersten, A.W. (2003). Verbs and nouns convey different types of motion in event descriptions. Linguistics, 41, 917-945.

Goldstone, R.L., & Kersten, A.W. (2003). Concepts and categorization. In A.F. Healy & R.W. Proctor (Eds.), Experimental Psychology (pp. 599-621). Volume 4 in I.B. Weiner (Editor-in-Chief), Handbook of psychology. New York: Wiley.

Earles, J.L., & Kersten, A.W. (2002). Directed forgetting of actions by younger and older adults. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review, 9, 383-388.

Kersten, A.W., & Smith, L.B. (2002). Attention to novel objects during verb learning. Child Development, 73, 93-109.

Kersten, A.W., & Earles, J.L. (2001). Less really is more for adults learning a miniature artificial language. Journal of Memory and Language, 44, 250-273.

Earles, J.L., & Kersten, A.W. (2000). Adult age differences in memory for verbs and nouns. Aging, Neuropsychology, and Cognition, 7, 130-139.

Goldstone, R. L., Steyvers, M., Spencer-Smith, J., & Kersten, A. (2000). Interactions between perceptual and conceptual learning. In E. Diettrich & A.B. Markman (Eds.), Cognitive dynamics: Conceptual and representational change in humans and machines. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.

Earles, J.L., & Kersten, A.W. (1999). Processing speed and adult age differences in activity memory. Experimental Aging Research, 25, 243-253.

Earles, J.L., Kersten, A.W., Turner, J.M., & McMullen, J. (1999). Influences of age, performance, and context on verbatim and gist recall of verb-noun pairs. Journal of General Psychology, 126, 97-110.

Kersten, A.W., Goldstone, R.L., & Schaffert, A. (1998). Two competing attentional mechanisms in category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 24, 1437-1458.

Kersten, A.W. (1998b). An examination of the distinction between nouns and verbs: Associations with two different kinds of motion. Memory and Cognition, 26, 1214-1232.

Earles, J.L., & Kersten, A.W. (1998). Influences of age and perceived activity difficulty on activity recall. Journals of Gerontology: Psychological Sciences, 53B, P324-P328.

Kersten, A.W. (1998a). A division of labor between nouns and verbs in the representation of motion. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 127, 34-54.

Kersten, A.W., & Billman, D.O. (1997). Event category learning. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 23, 638-658.

Kersten, A.W., & Billman, D.O. (1995). The roles of motion and moving parts in noun and verb meanings. Proceedings of the Seventeenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society.Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

Salthouse, T.A., & Kersten, A.W. (1993). Decomposing adult age differences in symbol arithmetic. Memory and Cognition, 21, 699-710.

Kersten, A.W., & Billman, D.O. (1992). The role of correlational structure in learning event categories. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Hillsdale: Erlbaum.

Manuscripts Submitted for Publication or in Revision

Kersten, A.W., Earles, J.L., Curtayne, E.S., & Lane, J.C. (2004). Adult age differences in binding actors and actions in eyewitness memory.

Earles, J.L., Kersten, A.W., Stadtlander, L.M., & Welsh, D. (2003). The contribution of haptic cues to memory for actions

Kersten, A.W., Meissner, C.A., Schwartz, B.L., & Iglesias, A. (2004). Effects of native language and linguistic context on the conceptualization of motion events in English and Spanish speakers.

Kersten, A.W. (2002). Differential hemispheric asymmetry in the perception of intrinsic and extrinsic motion.

Click here to see my complete Vita.

Click here to see my Statement of Research Interests.

Collaborators

Julie Earles Florida Atlantic University

Rob Goldstone Indiana University

Linda Smith Indiana University

Experimental Stimuli

Click on the titles below to see descriptions of several different research projects as well as movies showing examples of the stimuli I use in my research. You will need a QuickTime player to play these movies. Click here for information on how to download one.

Kersten, Meissner, Schwartz, & Iglesias (2004)

Kersten (2002)

Kersten & Smith (2002)

Kersten & Earles (2001)

Kersten, Goldstone, & Schaffert (1998)

Kersten (1998b)

Kersten (1998a)

Kersten & Billman (1997)