William Brewer

wbrewer@uiuc.edu

Professor of Psychology

Research Professor of Communications

Research Professor, Beckman Institute

Professor of Educational Psychology

Primary areas of interest: Cognitive psychology; knowledge representation and acquisition; psycholinguistics; history of psychology, language, and thought; human memory; reading; discourse.

Professor Brewer is a basic researcher who enjoys moving ideas across traditional discipline boundaries. His work in the field of cognitive science uses methodology and theory typically associated with cognitive psychology, linguistics, and artificial intelligence, with additional borrowing from philosophy, neuroscience, anthropology, and education. The theory he developed about how stories are structured to produce various responses has been supported with data gathered from a wide variety of subjects and exposes shortcomings in several cognitive science approaches to narrative. His research on memory has explored the ways knowledge distorts recall and the nature of autobiographical memory; and he has contributed to developing theories of how knowledge is represented in the mind through his studies of schemas, scripts, mental models, plans, and other forms of representation.

Ph.D., Psychology, University of Iowa

Also please visit Professor Brewer's website in the University of Illinois Department of Psychology