Dr. Majerus is a Research professor funded by the Belgian Fund for Scientific Research FNRS and he directs the Psychology & Neuroscience of Cognition research unit at the University of Liège, Belgium. He has been a visiting scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain sciences unit in Cambridge, the University of Sussex and the University of Hong Kong. He has been an invited professor at the University of Fribourg. He is currently associate editor for the journal Memory & Cognition and editor-in-chief for the journal Psychologica Belgica. His research focuses on working memory and its interactions with language and attention, using psychological and cognitive neuroscience methods.

Abstract:
Psycholinguistic effects, such as the lexicality effect (processing advantage for words over nonwords) to name just one example, are a hallmark property of verbal working memory (WM), having led to several linguistic WM accounts. In this talk, Dr. Steve Majerus will examine the boundaries of these linguistic accounts in the light of recent behavioral and neuroimaging data that aimed to determine the automatic vs. strategic nature of linguistic effects in verbal WM, the impact of linguistic variables on item vs. serial order maintenance and the neural representations supporting short-term maintenance of linguistic material. Dr. Majerus will show that linguistic knowledge and associated neural substrates can account for a large set of verbal WM phenomena, including some aspects of serial order retention, but also that verbal WM cannot be reduced to pure linguistic accounts. Dr. Majerus will conclude the talk by introducing the AO-WM model, an interactive and dynamic account of verbal WM and linguistic processing.