Prof. Lea’s Bio

Brooke Lea is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Psychology at Macalester College in St. Paul, MN. Lea graduated from Haverford College with a BA in English. He earned a PhD in Experimental Psychology from New York University in 1993 and then embarked on a two-year post-doc at University of Mass-Amherst.  His first academic job was at Bowdoin College, before he moved to Macalester in 1998.

Lea is a cognitive psychologist interested in reasoning and language.  He and his colleagues model how we process language on a moment-to-moment basis. Lea’s early research focused on psychological models of propositional logic.  A more recent interest has been in the role that poetic devices, such as rhyme, alliteration and meter, play in the comprehension of poetry. His work has appeared in numerous research journals, including the Journal of Memory and Language; Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, & Cognition; Discourse Processes; and Psychological Science.  He has also published two statistics textbooks with his co-author and former statistics professor, Barry H. Cohen, in whose class Lea met his future wife, Emily Fields, some thirty-five years ago.

The recipient of the Mink Award for outstanding teaching in Psychology, Lea teaches Cognitive Psychology, The Psychology of Language, and Research in Psychology I. His research group has bustled with students for the past 25 years. This context has provided Lea with some of the most gratifying moments in his career: “I am fortunate to have met and worked with a remarkable collection of students at Macalester.  Some of the sharpest, most creative minds I have ever known were possessed by the students working in my lab.  And as capable as they were intellectually, they were equally extraordinary as human beings.”

In 2011, Lea and his colleague David Matz at Augsburg College received a grant from the National Science Foundation to open eye-tracking labs, one at each of the two institutions.  Since the “iLab” opened in 2011, more than 60 students have worked on numerous projects, both research-centered and in support of classes in psychology and linguistics.  In 2015, Lea’s students moved the iLab to the Science Museum of Minnesota to create an exhibit over three weekends about eye-movement research.

Lea serves on the editorial boards of the Psychological Bulletin, Discourse Processes, and has served as a panelist on numerous NSF grant panels.  He directs the Cognitive Science Concentration at Macalester.