Alba Tuninetti is now an associate director at the institute of cognitive science at the university of colorado boulder

1. How did you become interested in cognitive science/psychology?

   It was my first year, and I was taking a seminar at University of Pennsylvania titled “Language and Cognition”. The professor showed us the McGurk effect, and it was honestly mind-blowing to me. From there, I started doing research on the cognitive side of things the summer after my first year.

2. What is the focus of your research?

   I focus on second language speech perception behaviorally and psycho-physiologically. I study second language speakers, new language learners, and at what point we see encoding of foreign language learning. I’ve also investigated word learning in monolingual and bilingual learners.

3. What aspects of your work do people get really excited about?

   Generally, the thing the people get most excited about is being able to see that even changes at the phoneme level produce results we can see in the brain. We can see these changes in EEG waveforms. One of the things that has gotten a lot of interest especially here, as an English language institution with Turkish native speakers, is the question of “full attainment.” Is it ever possible to gain a language to the level of a native speaker? Can we ever learn as fluently as a native speaker? My longer answer to this is yes depending on what you are asking. For example, why can’t we achieve the same level of mastery in phonemes as grammar? Does this lead to the biases of accentism?

4. What has been your experience being a person of color in cognitive science?

   I think I was pretty lucky in my own membership. I was supported a lot by things like diversity initiatives throughout my PhD. I think that helped a lot. It is hard to separate cognitive science vs. being an academic vs. just being in the world as someone diverse. I clearly remember things from when I was young like comments such as “you’re one of the good ones” or in undergrad “admitted to Penn because you are Brown.” I’ve definitely had people try to touch my hair and comment on my looks and things like that. This led to some full imposter syndrome to the extent of wondering if I am succeeding because my work is actually good and people think that it is good or is it so people can say “a diverse person did this”? In grad school, I started working to actively push against these ideas and become more aware of the kind of structural limits to what was being done. I became co-chair of the diversity committee in grad school and tried to push for programs to get people interested in cognitive psychology earlier in their college experience. I think that helped me as well to figure out that I was doing good work, and I was good enough to be in the places that I have gotten do. I still have some or maybe a lot of imposter syndrome but that helped a bit.

5. What changes have you noticed in your field or the field more generally?

   Probably one of the biggest things that I have noticed particularly from the linguistics side is a whole lot more openness about structural racism in the field. Not only acknowledging but also pushing against potentially harmfully conclusions being drawn. Scholars in the field are now recognizing that even our data interpretation may be rooted in structural racism or other biases. For example, the recent paper on female mentoring and the response regarding how the data were interpreted was heartening. Or the recent work on the inherent biases in using language corpora, which are not as objective as we might have once believed is another example. We’re now asking if anything can be objective. I need to make sure that in my own work I am also aware of anything I might be bringing into a project. 

6. Do you see spaces where diversity will change how/what questions cognitive psychology/cognitive science is asking?

   It is important think about diversity both in terms of the researcher but also what populations are being studied. Yes, access to remote populations is difficult, but it matters. One of the things that is important to me in cultivating these relationships is that I see it as a commitment to the people. You don’t just drop in as an Ivory Tower researcher, collect data, and write a paper that they will not read. But rather, have the ethical understanding of what it means to be in their community. The researcher should contribute back to the community in some way as well. Australia and New Zealand have better processes in terms of the ethicality of accessing the remote Indigenous communities as well as practices such as welcoming to country speeches that acknowledge the original inhabitants of a space.

7. Any advice for early career researchers of color?

   I think the biggest thing for me that helped was finding a good support network. I can’t emphasize enough how helpful it was during my PhD and postdoc to have people that you can talk to about basically anything. Having someone else going through the same things as you is valuable, but right now it is weird because everything is online so there aren’t the same options for this. One thing that helped me was joining the organizations trying to test the boundaries of what was being done and making the spaces better. I recommend working with not only people at your level but also people at higher levels within your department and across the university to implement the initiatives or further the initiatives of inclusion.

8. How do you protect your time?

   I enjoy fiction especially science fiction and fantasy and I make time before I go to sleep to read. There are favorite trilogies I return to because they are excellent but also comfortable. During the pandemic, I have gotten really into baking, but I try not to do that too often.