Cristina López-Rojas, PhD

Much of our everyday cognition is oriented toward the future: we anticipate events, make plans, remember intentions and imagine what lies ahead. Yet in a world where more than half of the population speaks two or more languages, we still know little about how the language we use shapes the way we think about the future.

My research grew out of prospective memory — remembering to act on our intentions — where I showed that the language bilinguals are operating in changes how they monitor for and retrieve future intentions. Building on this foundation, I am now extending my work to future-oriented cognition more broadly: do bilinguals imagine their personal and collective futures differently in their first and second language, or when the linguistic context is incongruent? To answer these questions I combine behavioural paradigms with the co-registration of EEG and eye-tracking, an approach still scarce in bilingualism research.