Assistant Professor Brian N. Larson is speaking in a panel on "New/Now Cognitivism" at the Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC). Dr. Peter Elbow, Professor Emeritus at UMass-Amherst, will chair the panel.

In his talk, titled “Relevance, cognitive environment, and audience,” Larson offers a cognitive model for analyzing rhetorical performance by explaining the writer’s and audience’s “cognitive environments.” As used here, this concept originated with Sperber and Wilson (1995) in linguistic pragmatics but retained rationalist assumptions that have made that field difficult to reconcile with rhetoric (Dascal & Gross, 1999; Liu & Zhu, 2011). Strassheim (2010) extended the model to account for goals as part of the cognitive environment. And finally, Larson extends the model further, accounting for writers’ and readers’ emotions, habits, and cognitive biases or “heuristics” (Gigerenzer & Brighton, 2009). Relevance is the ratio of desired cognitive effects to cognitive effort in the cognitive environment: The greater the effect-numerator, the greater the relevance; the greater the effort-denominator, the lesser the relevance. Writers and readers seek increased relevance. The writer, reader, and researcher all can use the model of the cognitive environment and relevance for generating, interpreting, and explaining written texts as literate action.