Daniel Mirman

Senior Lecturer

Biography

Background

I received my PhD in Psychology in 2005 from Carnegie Mellon University and the interdisciplinary cognitive neuroscience program in the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition. My doctoral work combined behavioral experiments with computational modeling to study how auditory perception and language knowledge interact during speech perception. I then completed a post-doctoral fellowship at the University of Connecticut where I learned eye-tracking methods for on-line measurement of speech comprehension and began to study how semantic knowledge is organized in the mind. In 2009 I joined the Moss Rehabilitation Research Institute (MRRI) and began my research on the neural organization of spoken language processing in individuals with language deficits following stroke (aphasia). I have taught in the Department of Psychology at Drexel University (2013-2016) and the University of Alabama at Birmingham (2016-2019) while continuing my research collaboration with MRRI. I joined the University of Edinburgh in 2019.

I was a co-organizer of the 38th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society (2016) and served as an Associate Editor of Cognitive Science. I am currently Editor-in-Chief of Psychonomic Bulletin & Review and Special Issue Editor for Cortex.

CV

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Undergraduate teaching

  • Psychology 1
  • Tutorial(s)

Postgraduate teaching

  • Linear mixed effects modeling
  • Neuroscience of Language

Open to PhD supervision enquiries?

Yes

Current PhD students supervised

Erica Adezati

Past PhD students supervised

Melissa Thye

Jon-Frederick Landrigan

Laura Skipper-Kallal

Research summary

My current research is focused in four areas:

  1. Functional communication, production and comprehension of narratives
  2. Processing of metaphors and poetic language
  3. The organization of semantic knowledge
  4. Developing new statistical methods and data sharing  

Selected publications

Ding, J., Middleton, E.L., and Mirman, D. (2023). Impaired discourse content in aphasia is associated with frontal white matter damage. Brain Communications, 5(6):fcad310, 1-13. https://doi.org/10.1093/braincomms/fcad310.

Errington, P.J., Thye, M., and Mirman, D. (2022). Difficulty and pleasure in the comprehension of verb-based metaphor sentences: A behavioral study. PLoS ONE 17(2): e0263781. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0263781.

Mirman, D. and Thye, M. (2018). Uncovering the Neuroanatomy of Core Language Systems Using Lesion-Symptom Mapping. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 27(6), 455-461. DOI: 10.1177/0963721418787486

Mirman, D., Landrigan, J.-F., and Britt, A.E. (2017). Taxonomic and Thematic Semantic Systems. Psychological Bulletin, 143(5), 499-520. DOI: 10.1037/bul0000092.

Mirman, D., Chen, Q., Zhang, Y., Wang, Z., Faseyitan, O.K., Coslett, H.B., and Schwartz, M.F. (2015). Neural Organization of Spoken Language Revealed by Lesion-Symptom Mapping. Nature Communications, 6(6762), 1-9. DOI: 10.1038/ncomms7762.

Mirman, D. and Britt, A. E. (2014). What we talk about when we talk about access deficits. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 369(1634). DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2012.0388.

Mirman, D. (2014). Growth Curve Analysis and Visualization Using R. Boca Raton, FL: Chapman and Hall / CRC Press.

Chen, Q. and Mirman, D. (2012). Competition and cooperation among similar representations: Toward a unified account of facilitative and inhibitory effects of lexical neighbors. Psychological Review, 119(2), 417-430. DOI: 10.1037/a0027175.

Current project grants

The Tower of Babel and Linguistic Diversity: Investigating the Connections Between Multilingualism, Neurodiversity, and Spiritual Flourishing (John Templeton Foundation), 05/2024 - 04/2026
Functional Communication Deficits in Post-Stroke Aphasia (NIH/NIDCD R01DC017137), 09/2019 – 08/2024
Developing a Counterfactual Analysis Digital Tool (Wellcome Trust Mental Health Data Prize), 09/2022 – 05/2024

Past project grants

Dynamics of spoken word comprehension in aphasia (NIH/NIDCD R01DC010805), 06/2010 – 11/2016
Effect of brain damage on oculomotor and cognitive dynamics (Albert Einstein Society Research Grant #09-13), 01/2010 – 07/2011

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