Francis Steen
Biography
I research how people use the multimodal information in mass media to form complex and integrated models of reality, using language, images, gesture, and emotion.
A central area of my research is how the news engages in a process of reasoning about the causes of events, and about how to intervene and take control of the future; see my talk on The News as a Social Process for Improving Society. I develop these themes in the international research project Negotiating Values: Collective Identities and Resilience after 22/7, led by the Peace Research Institute in Oslo and funded by the Norwegian Research Council, where I examine the media response to the attacks in Oslo on July 22, 2011. My collaborators at UCLA include Johanna Drucker, GSR Morgan Currie, and my RA Abi Magalong.
How we form complex and integrated models of reality has important consequences for education, and I am part of research groups in Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and Education that examine how children and students learn. In 2011-12, I was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Norwegian Academy of Sciences in Oslo, studying Time is Space: Unconscious Models and Conscious Acts with a group of cognitive linguists examining how a sense of “here” and “now” is created in the news.
Education
Ph.D., English, University of California, Santa Barbara
M.A., English, University of Oslo, Norway
B.A., English and History of Ideas, University of Oslo, Norway
Research
Multimodal communication in mass media; advertising; entertainment; computational communication
Selected Publications
Steen, F. F., & Chakraborty, S. (2022). Exploring the possible: A unifying cognitive and evolutionary approach to art. Frontiers in Psychology, 12, 787789.
Steen, F. F., Hougaard, A., Joo, J., Olza, I., Cánovas, C. P., Pleshakova, A., … & Turner, M. (2018). Toward an infrastructure for data-driven multimodal communication research. Linguistics Vanguard, 4(1), 20170041.
Joo, J., Li, W., Steen, F. F., & Zhu, S. C. (2014). Visual persuasion: Inferring communicative intents of images. In Proceedings of the IEEE conference on computer vision and pattern recognition (pp. 216-223).
Steen, F. F. (2005). The paradox of narrative thinking. Journal of Cultural and Evolutionary Psychology, 3(1), 87-105.
Steen, F. F., & Owens, S. (2001). Evolution’s pedagogy: An adaptationist model of pretense and entertainment. Journal of Cognition and Culture, 1(4), 289-321.
