Contact information
Research groups
Colleges
Asifa Majid
Professor of Cognitive Science
- Fellow of St Hugh's College
Research summary
Humans are one species and yet we speak 7000 different, mutually unintelligible languages each hosted in distinct cultural niches. How does this diversity of language, culture, and experience affect how people think and behave? Research in my lab investigates the relationship between language, culture, and cognition by conducting studies with adults in different cultures and sub-cultures, and by tracing how concepts develop over a child’s lifetime in diverse cultural contexts. The goal is to establish which aspects of cognition are fundamentally shared, and which are language- or culture-specific. This work combines laboratory and field experiments, as well as in-depth linguistic studies and ethnographically-informed description. This coordinated approach has been used to study domains such as space, events, and perception, with a special interest in olfaction.
Recent publications
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A standardized lexicon of body odor words crafted from 17 countries.
Journal article
Bierling AL. et al, (2025), Sci Data, 12
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Not all verbal labels grease the wheels of odor categories
Journal article
Cao Y. et al, (2025), Language and Cognition, 17
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What we mean when we say semantic: Toward a multidisciplinary semantic glossary.
Journal article
Reilly J. et al, (2025), Psychon Bull Rev, 32, 243 - 280
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A manifesto for a globally diverse, equitable, and inclusive open science.
Journal article
Ghai S. et al, (2025), Commun Psychol, 3
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Language and economic behaviour: Future tense use causes less not more temporal discounting.
Journal article
Robertson C. et al, (2025), PLoS One, 20