John Clapper

Cognitive psychology, categories and concepts, unsupervised learning, attention and memory organization, computational models of human learning.

My research examines human learning, with a primary focus on category and concept formation. I investigate unsupervised category learning — how people discover meaningful categories without explicit feedback — and have provided evidence for a discrete category invention process driven by novelty or surprise rather than gradual associative learning. I have also studied how prior knowledge facilitates unsupervised learning and how different forms of similarity shape the perception of psychologically "natural" categories. My current research explores how people learn and represent variation in continuous properties such as size and quantity, including how they encode the overall shapes of property distributions (e.g., normal or bimodal), maintain category-specific knowledge in memory, and apply that knowledge across different cognitive tasks.

My second area of research focuses on mindfulness meditation, particularly the relationships among breathing, psychophysiological coherence, and sustained attention. This work emphasizes the integration of physiological measures, particularly heart rate variability, with psychological measures of attentional performance, effort, and perceived mind wandering. The overarching goal of this research program is to determine whether meditation functions primarily as a form of cognitive-attentional training, physiological regulation, or a synergistic combination of both.