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Phillip J. Holcomb

Contact Info Department of Psychology Tufts University Psychology Building Room 314 Medford, MA 02155 Lab Website Tel: 617-627-2319 Email Professor

Professor of Psychology
Ph.D., New Mexico State University, 1984

Phillip J Holcomb, PhD, is a Professor in the Dept. of Psychology at Tufts University where he co-directs the NeuroCognition Laboratory with his colleague Dr. Gina Kuperberg. Dr. Holcomb received his Ph.D. in 1984 from New Mexico State University, in Las Cruses, NM. He then did a post-doc at UCSD and the Salk Institute in La Jolla, CA with Dr. Helen Neville. He has been at Tufts since 1988.

Dr. Holcomb's primary research interests are in how the brain represents and processes language during reading and listening to speech both in ones native language and when learning a new second language. In a related vein he is also interested in how the brain recognizes visually encountered objects. The primary measure used in the lab for studying language and picture comprehension is the event-related brain potential (ERP) technique, although along with Dr. Kuperberg at MGH he also does some work with fMRI. More details >

Graduate students
Graduate students interested in the research performed in the NeuroCognition lab should first visit our web site and check out some of the ongoing projects listed there. If you find this line of research interesting you should contact Dr. Holcomb or Dr. Kuperberg.

Undergraduate students
We welcome undergraduate involvement in our research. If you think you might be interested in getting involved with us please visit our web site and check out some of the ongoing projects listed there. If you find this line of research interesting you should contact Dr. Holcomb or Dr. Kuperberg.

Representative Publications

• Holcomb, P.J., & Grainger, J. (2006). On the time course of visual word recognition: An event-related potential investigation using masked repetition priming. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1631-1643.
• Daffner, K. Ryan, K.K., Williams, D.M., Budson, A.E., Rentz, D.M., Wolk, D.A. Holcomb, P.J.  (2006). Increased responsiveness to novelty is associated with successful cognitive aging. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 18, 1759-1773.
• Wolk, D.A., Schacter, D.L., Lygizos, M. Sen, N.M., Holcomb, P.J., Daffner, K.R., Budson, A.E. (2006) ERP correlates of recognition memory: Effects of retention interval and false alarms. Brain Research, 1096, 148-162.
• Kuperberg, G., Lakshmanan, B., Caplan, D., & Holcomb, P.J. (2006). Making sense of discourse: an fMRI study of causal inferencing across sentences. NeuroImage, 33, 343-361.
• Kreher, D., Holcomb, P. J. & Kuperberg, G. (2006). An electrophysiological investigation of indirect semantic priming. Psychophysiology, 43,
• Eddy, M., Schmid, A., Holcomb, P.J. (2006). A new approach to tracking the time-course of object perception: masked repetition priming and event-related brain potentials. Psychophysiology, 43.
• Goslin, J., Grainger, J. & Holcomb, P.J. (2006). Syllable frequency effects in French visual word recognition: an ERP study. Brain Research, 121-134.
• Grainger, J., Kiyonaga, K., & Holcomb, P.J. (in press). The time-course of orthographic and phonological code activation. Psychological Science.
• Petit, J., Grainger, J., Midgley, K.J., & Holcomb, P.J. (in press). On the time-course of processing in letter perception: A masked priming ERP investigation. Psychonomic Bulletin and Review.
• Kuperberg, G.R., Kreher, D., Sitnikova, T., Caplan, D.N., & Holcomb, P. J. (in press). The role of animacy and thematic relationships in processing active English sentences: Evidence from event-related potentials. Brain & Language.
• Kiyonaga, K. Midgley, K.J., Holcomb, P.J., & Grainger, J. (in press). Masked Cross-Modal Repetition Priming: An ERP Investigation. Language and Cognitive Processes.
• Ditman, T., Holcomb, P. J., & Kuperberg, G. (in press). The Contributions of lexico-semantic and discourse information to the resolution of ambiguous categorical anaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes.