Gerry Altmann

Professor and Director of Perception, Action, and Cognition

Psychological Sciences

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Education

Ph.D., 1986, University of Edinburgh

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Research Interests

Dr. Altmann studies how individuals incrementally build representations of the events described by unfolding language. He uses a mix of behavioral methods (predominantly eye-tracking) and neuroscientific methods when conducting his research. His other interests include:

• Sentence processing 
• Event cognition
• Object representation

Research Websites 

• Psycholinguist: Gerry Altmann
• Altmann Lab  

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Teaching

Undergraduate 

• PSYC 3500. Introduction to Psychology of Language

Graduate 

• • Event Cognition
  • Computational Approaches to Language and Mind

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Publications

Recent

Krass, K. L., Hoang, J. S., Joergensen, G. H., & Altmann, G.T.M. (2025). Anticipatory eye movements revisited: From affordances and actions to consequences and states. Brain Research. 149742.

Prystauka, Y., Wing, E., & Altmann, G.T.M. (2024). Investigating the interplay between morphosyntax and event comprehension from the perspective of intersecting object histories. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.1037/xlm0001307

Prystauka, Y., Altmann, G.T.M., & Rothman, J. (2024). Online eye tracking and real-time sentence processing: On opportunities and efficacy for capturing psycholinguistic effects of different magnitudes and diversity. _Behavior Research Methods. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13428-023-02176-4

Davis, F., & Altmann, G.T.M. (2021). Finding event structure in time: What recurrent neural networks can tell us about event structure in mind. Cognition, 104651

Representative 

Altmann, G.T.M. & Ekves, Z., (2019). Events as intersecting object histories: A new theory of event representation. Psychological Review. doi: 10.1037/rev0000154

Solomon, S. H., Hindy, N. C., Altmann, G. T., & Thompson-Schill, S. L. (2015). Competition between mutually exclusive object states in event comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 27(12), 2324-2338

Altmann, G.T.M. and Mirkovic, J. (2009). Incrementality and prediction in human sentence processing. Cognitive Science, 33, 583-609.

Altmann, G.T.M. and Kamide, Y. (2009). Discourse-mediation of the mapping between language and the visual world: eye-movements and mental representation. Cognition, 111, 55-71.

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Honors and Awards

Founding Director, CT Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences, 2015-2021

Editor-in-Chief, Cognition, 2006-2015

Moved to UConn from University of York, UK, in 2014. Served on grant panels in both the USA (NIH LCOM) and UK (ESRC) as well as on various panels in Europe (Spain, Germany). Was an Hon. Secretary of the UKs Experimental Psychology Society from 2004-2007.