Lawrence W. Barsalou (born November 3, 1951) is an American psychologist and a cognitive scientist, currently working at the University of Glasgow. Career At the University of Glasgow, Barsalou is a professor of psychology, performing research in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. He received a bachelor's degree in psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977 (George Mandler, advisor), and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University in 1981 (Gordon Bower, advisor). Since then, Barsalou has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, joining the University of Glasgow in 2015. Barsalou’s research has been funded by the National Science Foundation and other US funding agencies. He has held a Guggenheim fellowship, served as the chair of the Cognitive Science Society, and won an award for graduate teaching from the University of Chicago. Barsalou is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Psychological Association, the Association for Psychological Science, the Cognitive Science Society, the Mind and Life Institute, and the Society of Experimental Psychologists. He is a winner of the Distinguished Cognitive Science Award from the University of California, Merced. Research Barsalou's research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, and health cognition. Across domains, much of this work focuses on the impact of goals and environmental context on cognitive processing, as well as how multimodal simulation, situated conceptualization, and embodiment ground conceptual processing. Ad hoc categories Perhaps Barsalou’s most notable contribution to the field of cognitive psychology is his research on ad hoc, or goal-derived, categories. Prior to this work, the vast majority of research on the cognitive representation of categories dealt solely with taxonomic categories, in which category membership is established due to overlap in both conceptual and physical features. However, Barsalou (1983) posited that this is not the only type of category. While featural relatedness intrinsically forms taxonomic categories that can be used to guide cognition, the formation of other types of categories is required for us to accomplish goals. These categories, termed ad hoc categories, are actively constructed from existing knowledge in order to satisfy the demands of a specific goal context. Ad hoc categories differ from traditional categories in two principle ways. First, they violate the correlational structure of the environment. In line with previous work by