I study how people glean or create meanings from contextual clues and patterns. Such cognitive parsing usually calls upon implicit and embedded as well as explicit information. It occurs in performing a task, knowing how to act in a social situation, figuring out the genre of a poem, or conversing in a natural language. More structured tasks interest me the most: how do people go about navigating a piece of writing or music, or a computer interface? How do they carry out a large goal by performing a series of more specific actions?

I worked on these areas as a literary scholar from 1984-2000, and in the field of website and software design from 2000-2024.

If you want to find something I wrote or have any questions, please email me. Thank you!