Dr. Michael Masson M.A. PhD.,
Associate Dean – Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Victoria

You can grab a coffee cup. You can name the coffee cup. But does how you grab the cup influence how you name the cup? We know that what we think can shape what we do, but is the reverse the case? Do your actions and intentions shape your thought? Join us for a psychology colloquium where we will address these questions.

Intention and Action

Dr. Masson's most recent work has been concerned with the representation of hand actions and how these representations influence object perception and language comprehension. His presentation will review some aspects of this work, emphasizing the relation between action intention and the performance of manual actions.

Biography:

Dr. Masson obtained his Bachelor's degree at the University of British Columbia and received his PhD from the University of Colorado. After completing postdoctoral research at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he joined the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria in 1980. His research has been continuously funded by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada since 1981. Has served as chair of the Department of Psychology at the University of Victoria and is currently Associate Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences. In 2018, Dr. Masson received the Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science.

Dr. Masson's research has covered a broad range of topics in the field of cognitive psychology, including human memory, text comprehension, word identification processes, cognitive control, and the relation between cognition and action. Some of his work has been applied to practical problems such as how the use of plain language can influence the understanding of legal documents, the potential benefits of video-game playing on understanding principles of object motion, and the questionable claims of speed reading methods. Dr. Masson and his colleagues discovered a new visual motion illusion (the bicycle illusion) that inspired an Amsterdam-based alternative rock band to write a song about the discovery and investigation of the illusion. He also has helped to develop and elucidate useful statistical methods such as specialized confidence intervals and Bayesian analyses.