Sean Trott

Sean Trott is Assistant Teaching Professor in Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, specializing in language comprehension, computational modeling, and large language models. His research examines how humans and language models represent meaning and resolve ambiguity.

Research combines behavioral experiments, corpus analysis, and LLM probing to investigate lexical ambiguity, context effects, and semantic representation. Current projects explore cognitive plausibility of LLMs and computational accounts of language processing.

Publications analyze word meaning representation, theory of mind capabilities in LLMs, cross-linguistic differences in language processing, and educational applications of large language models. Recent work appears in Psychological Review, Cognitive Science, and ACL proceedings.

Teaching covers computational social science, programming, statistics, and language-related courses. Developed the RAW-C dataset for studying ambiguous words in context. Maintains the Counterfactual newsletter on cognitive science and AI.

Laboratory develops methods for using LLMs as cognitive models and evaluates their alignment with human language processing.