Tamara Swaab

Education

• Ph.D., Cognitive Neuroscience, University of Nijmegen and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, The Netherlands, 1996
• B.S., Neuropsychology, University of Nijmegen, 1988

About

In addition to her academic appointment in the Department of Psychology, Tamara Swaab is a core faculty member in the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. She is also director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab. In 2007 and 2016 she was elected a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, both in the Netherlands. In 2021, she was named a Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science for her contributions to the understanding of human language and cognition. She currently serves as Editor-in-Chief for Cognition (https://www.journals.elsevier.com/cognition).

Research Focus

Dr. Swaab's research program focuses on the cognitive and neural underpinnings of language comprehension in monolingual and (bimodal) bilingual young and older adults. In her research she use multiple methods to gain a deep understanding of the psychological processes and brain mechanisms used to extract meaning from text and conversation, including: eye-tracking (collaboratively), recording of brain electrical activity (EEG/ERPs), machine learning and a variety of behavioral measures. Our research program has been supported since 1997 by grants from the McDonnell-Pew Foundation, NSF, NIMH and NIA.

Publications

• Swaab, T.Y., Ledoux, K., Camblin, C.C., & Boudewyn, M.A. (2012) Language related ERP components. (Book Chapter). In: Luck, S. J. & Kappenman, E.S. (Eds.), pp 397-440. Oxford Handbook of Event-Related Potential Components. New York: Oxford University Press
• Brothers, T., Swaab, T.Y., and Traxler, M.J. (2015). Effect of prediction and contextual support on lexical processing: Prediction takes precedence. Cognition, 136, 135-149
• Boudewyn, M. A., Long, D. L., & Swaab, T. Y. (2015). Graded expectations: Predictive processing and the adjustment of expectations during spoken language comprehension. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 15, 607-624.
• Dave, S., Brothers, T., & Swaab, T.Y. (2018). 1/f Neural Noise and Electrophysiological Indices of Contextual Prediction in Normative Aging. Brain Research. doi: 10.1016/j.brainres.2018.04.007.
• Sendek, K., Corina, D. P., Cates, D., Traxler, M. J., & Swaab, T. Y. (2023). L1 referential features influence pronoun reading in L2 for deaf, ASL–English bilinguals. Bilingualism: Language and cognition, 26(4), 738-750.
• Trammel, T., Khodayari, N., Luck, S. J., Traxler, M. J., & Swaab, T. Y. (2023). Decoding semantic relatedness and prediction from EEG: A classification method comparison. NeuroImage, 277, 120268.

Teaching

Professor Swaab teaches in the areas of Perception, Cognition, and Cognitive Neuroscience. She has taught classes in Language & Cognition, Fundamentals of Human Electrophysiology and Cognitive Neuroscience.

Awards

Professor Swaab has won numerous awards throughout her career. She was a visiting fellow at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, and she received a career development award from the National Science Foundation (POWRE) and a Mc-Donnell-Pew Individual Investigator award. In 2021 she was named Fellow of the Association for Psychological Science.