Connie Shears, Ph.D. Associate Professor of Psychology E-mail: shears@chapman.edu Phone: (714) 744-7914 Office: Smith Hall 116A Curriculum Vitae

Education

Research Interests & Teaching

My research investigates comprehension of language, semantic memory processes, and attentional limits related to cognitive resource demands.  I have a research liaison with an adult rehabilitation program for survivors of acquired brain injury where I examine how brain injury disrupts these comprehension processes.  I direct an active research program in my Cognitive Science lab at Chapman University, which provides many students with first-hand experience in psychological research activities and has supported several student-based research projects.  I also teach undergraduate courses in Statistics, Research Methods, Perception and Cognitive Psychology.  Most of these courses are designed to offer students direct experience with the scientific method of psychological research and support student projects that reflect mastery of hypotheses testing and APA research reports.

Publications

Shears, C. Miller, V., Ball, M., Hawkins, A., Griggs, J., Varner, A. (2007). Cognitive
       demand differences in causal inferences: Characters' plans are more difficult
       to comprehend than physical causation.  Discourse Processes, 43, 1-24.

Chiarello, C., Kacinik, N., Shears, C., Arambel, S., Halderman, L., and Robinson, Cathy
       (2006).  Exploring cerebral asymmetries for the verb generation task.  
       Neuropsychology, 20, 88-104.

 

Miller, V. and Shears, C. (2005). Emotion vs. language processing across the cerebral
       hemispheres:  Apathy as an emotional and linguistic construct.  Brain and Cognition, 
       60, 30-32.

 

Shears, C. and Chiarello, C. (2004).  Knowledge-based inferences are NOT general. 
        Discourse Processes, 38, 31-55.

 

Shears, C. and Weiss, E. (2004). Inference vs. Control sentences:  Are readers able to
        detect our intended differences?   Brain and Cognition, 57, 195-197.

Chiarello, C., Shears, C., Liu, S., and Kacinik, N. (2004).  Influence of Word Class
        Proportion on Cerebral Asymmetries for High and Low Imagery Words. 
        Brain and Cognition, 57, 35-38.

Shears, C. and Chiarello. (2003).  No go on neutrals?  Semantic category priming
        revisited.  Lateralitiy, 8, 1-23.

Chiarello, C., Liu, S., Shears, C., Kacinik, N., and Quan, N. (2003).  Priming of strong
         semantic relations in the left and right visual fields: A time course investigation.
         Neuropsychologia, 41, 721-732.

Chiarello, C., Liu, S., Shears, C., and Kacinik, N. (2002). Differential asymmetries for 
         recognizing nouns and verbs:  Where are they? Neuropsycholgy 16, 35-48.

Manuscripts Submitted

Shears, C., Hawkins, A., Varner, A., Lewis., L., Heatley, J. (2007).  Hemispheric
         differences in knowledge -based inferences: Depend upon the domain of
         knowledge. Submitted to Psychological Science.     

Manuscripts in Preparation

Cabral, J. and Shears, C. (2007).  Manipulating emotional ratings for the International
         Affective Picture System:  It's all about the context.  (Manuscript in preparation).

Shears, C., Miller, V., Ball, M., Hawkins, A., Griggs, J., Varner, A. (2006).  Going the
         distance: Inference processes from physical vs. planning knowledge in survivors
         of acquire brain injury.  (Manuscript in preparation).