Monday
03
August 2026
1:00 - 2:30 PM IST
Location
Room 004, School of Arts and Sciences
Central Campus
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Do you have an Inner Monologue? How the Mind Uses Space and Language to Think
From Student to Researcher: An Alumna Research Talk
Manushi Pandya
SpeakerWhy do we say we are “close” to some people and “distant” from others, even though there is no literal distance involved? Some meetings are “long”, and some are “short”. What are the other ways we can think? We often find ourselves using space and language, to represent abstract ideas such as memory, attention, and emotion.
This talk traces questions from my undergraduate thesis to graduate work such as: what makes a face memorable, and does it become more so if it resembles your own? How does an emotional image briefly “blind” us to whatever follows it, and what makes that blindness fade? Do all cultures think of happy as “up” and disgust as “down,” or does that mapping shift depending on how a culture feels emotions should be expressed? Do inner monologues differ between adults with autism and neurotypicals?
Speaker
Manushi Pandya
Manushi is a first year PhD student in Developmental/Cognitive Psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, in the Language and Cognition Lab under Professor Mahesh Srinivasan. She completed her Master's in Psychology at Arizona State University, where her research examined the spatial coding of emotion and dialogic inner speech. She got a Bachelors in Psychology at Ahmedabad University, where she wrote her undergraduate thesis on memorability and self-similarity with Professor Nithin George. She later spent a year working with Professor Divita Singh as a Research Assistant on mitigating Emotion Induced Blindness through spatial cueing. Her work broadly explores how the mind represents abstract concepts like including time, space, and emotion; through attention, memory, and language.