Susan Brennan

Susan Elise Brennan is a cognitive scientist known for her research on human communication within the multiple lenses of linguistics, psychology, and computer science. She holds the positions of Distinguished Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in Stony Brook University.

Brennan is a member of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). In 2003, she won the State University of New York (SUNY) Chancellors Research Recognition Award and in 2023, she was appointed Distinguished Professor by the SUNY Board of Trustees.

Biography Brennan received her B.A. degree in Anthropology at Cornell University. She continued her education at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where she worked under the supervision of Nicholas Negroponte in the MIT Department of Architecture and the Architecture Machine Group. Brennan's master's thesis on computer generation of caricatures, published in 1982, launched the beginning of her accomplished career in academia. Her thesis was groundbreaking in using an innovative computer program to design faces with exaggerated features. This contributed to the evolution of the ability of computers to recognize facial features, and through a cognitive science lens, provided insight into the way humans process and perceive facial features. In 2021, Brennan along with four of her colleagues at Stony Brook University were awarded a cumulative $3 million NSF grant to support graduate student research training in data science and artificial intelligence (AI). Their project was featured on the NSF website for its efforts aimed at detecting and combating biases in AI.

Research Brennan's research program examines communication in varied contexts and interactive processes of human conversation. While some linguistic research focuses on either the listener or speaker in a conversation, Brennan's experimental designs allows for both perspectives to be analyzed. She explored the linguistic devices used by speakers to draw attention to "entities" of their conversation by controlling audio-visual stimuli in and out of focus. Participants in this study wore eyetrackers while completing tasks either alone or collaborating utilizing verbal discussion, looking or gazing without discussion, or a combination of both. Brennan and her team were looking at how quickly and accurately the task was completed. The study is an important contribution to the field because the "shared-gaze" condition resulted in faster, more efficient task completion compared to the conditions including dialogue.

Representative publications

Brennan, S. E. (1985). Caricature generator: the dynamic exaggeration of faces by computer. Leonardo, 18(3), 170-178. Brennan, S. E. (1995). Centering attention in discourse. Language and Cognitive processes, 10(2), 137-167. https://doi.org/10.1080/01690969508407091 Brennan, S. E., & Clark, H. H. (1996). Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 22(6), 1482–1493. https://doi.org/10.1037/0278-7393.22.6.1482 Brennan, S. E., Friedman, M. W., & Pollard, C. J. (1987). A centering approach to pronouns. In Proceedings of the 25th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (pp. 155-162). Stanford. Clark, H. H., & Brennan, S. E. (1991). Grounding in communication. In L. B. Resnick, J. M. Levine, & S. D. Teasley (Eds.), Perspectives on socially shared cognition (pp. 127–149). American Psychological Association.