Tamara Swaab

Tamara Swaab is a Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Davis, and a core faculty member at the UC Davis Center for Mind and Brain. She directs the Cognitive Neuroscience of Language Lab, focusing on the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying language comprehension. Her research integrates behavioral methods, ERP, and fMRI to study sentence processing, discourse, and lexical representation in both healthy and clinical populations (e.g., schizophrenia patients). She holds editorial roles at Linguistics and Language Compass, Brain Research, and Frontiers in Neuroscience, and is a fellow of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics and the Text and Discourse Neuroimaging Workshop (both since 2007).

Her work explores how contextual factors influence language processing, including prediction mechanisms, discourse coherence, and bilingual effects. Key findings include the role of cognitive control in schizophrenia patients and age-related changes in anticipatory processing. She collaborates widely, with studies spanning ERP signatures of language deficits and neural oscillations in anticipation.

Scientific awards include her 2007 fellowships, recognizing contributions to psycholinguistics and neuroimaging. Her lab emphasizes interdisciplinary approaches, combining experimental psychology with neuroscience techniques to address fundamental questions about human language.