Stephen Flusberg
Associate Professor of Psychology
Faculty Director of Pedagogy Development
I am a cognitive psychologist by training, though my academic interests span a variety of disciplines and methods. At Purchase I direct the Everyday Cognition Lab (ECL), where my students and I explore how commonplace activities and experiences – like picking up an object, reading a newspaper article, or lying on the couch to watch TV – affect how we perceive and think about the world.
We are particularly interested in (1) how people think about complex and abstract issues, (2) how these abilities are shaped by experience and relate to more basic social-cognitive processes, and (3) how we can leverage these insights to make a real-world impact. Read more about our research HERE.
Representative Courses
- Language & Thought
- Learning & Memory
- Introduction to Psychology
- Research Methods 1: Statistics & Design
- Sensing & Knowing in Anthropology, Psychology, & the Arts
Publications
Flusberg, S. J., Lauria, M., Balko, S. & Thibodeau, P. H. (2020). Effects of communication modality and speaker identity on metaphor framing. Metaphor & Symbol [pdf]
Thibodeau, P.H., Matlock, T., & Flusberg, S. J. (2019). The role of metaphor in communication and thought. Language & Linguistics Compass, 13(5) [pdf]
Flusberg, S. J., Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2018). War metaphors in public discourse. Metaphor & Symbol, 33(1), 1-18 [pdf]
Flusberg, S. J., Matlock, T., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2017). Metaphors for the war (or race) against climate change. Environmental Communication, 11(6), 769-783 [pdf]
Thibodeau, P. H. & Flusberg, S. J. (2017). Metaphorical accounting: How framing the federal budget like a household’s affects voting intentions. Cognitive Science, 41(S5), 1168-1182 [pdf]
Thibodeau, P. H., Crow, L. & Flusberg, S. J. (2017). The metaphor police: A case study of the role of metaphor in explanation. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 24(5), 1375-1386 [pdf]
Flusberg, S. J. & McClelland, J. L. (2014). Connectionism and the emergence of mind. Oxford University Press Handbook of Cognitive Science [pdf]
Davidenko, N. & Flusberg, S. J. (2012). Environmental inversion effects in face perception. Cognition, 123(3), 442-447 [pdf]
Flusberg, S. J. & Boroditsky, L. (2011). Are things that are hard to physically move also hard to imagine moving? Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 18(1), 158-164 [pdf]
Full list of publications available HERE