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Degrees

• PhD and MSc in Psycholinguistics, University of Edinburgh
• BSc (Hons) in Biological Sciences, University of Edinburgh

Research Interests  

My research investigates the psychology and neuroscience of human language comprehension. I am interested in how humans are able to rapidly understand each other, why it is that misinterpretations sometimes arise and what the cognitive and neural mechanisms are that best explain variability between individuals.

I use methods from experimental psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience, to test cognitive theories and to learn more about the brain networks (both language-selective and domain-general) that support successful language comprehension.

Biography

Lucy MacGregor is an Investigator Scientist at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge. She studied at the University of Edinburgh, and prior to moving to Cambridge, held research posts at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University, the University of Stirling, and the University of Leeds. She joined Â鶹ƵµÀ, first as an external Director of Studies, then as a Tutor in 2022.

Authored Work

Representative publications

Su Y, MacGregor LJ, Olasagasti I, Giraud A-L (2023). A deep hierarchy of predictions enables online meaning extraction in a computational model of human speech comprehension. PLoS Biology 21(3): e3002046. 

MacGregor, L.J., Gilbert, R.A., Balewski, Z., Mitchell, D. Erzinçlioglu, S., Rodd, J.M., Duncan, J., Fedorenko, E. & Davis, M.H. (2022). Causal contributions of the domain-general (Multiple Demand) and the language-selective brain networks to perceptual and semantic challenges in speech comprehension. Neurobiology of Language, 3(4), 665-698. 

MacGregor, L.J., Rodd, J.M., Gilbert, R.A., Hauk, O., Sohoglu, E., & Davis, M.H. (2020). The neural time course of semantic ambiguity resolution in speech comprehension. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 32(3), 403-425. 10.1162/jocn_a_01493

MacGregor, L.J., Bouwesema, J. & Klepousniotou, E. (2015). Sustained activation for polysemous but not homonymous words: Evidence from EEG. Neuropsychologia, 68, 126-138. 

MacGregor, L.J., Pulvermüller, F., van Casteren, M., & Shtyrov, Y. (2012). Ultra-rapid access to words in the brain. Nature Communications, 3: 711. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms1715