Utkarsh Shukla

I am an early-career researcher in Cognitive Science and Psychology, currently pursuing my PhD in the Cognitive, Developmental, and Brain Sciences program at Western University. I work in the Cognitive Development and Neuroimaging Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. J. Bruce Morton. With an academic background in applied psychology and cognitive science, my research is driven by a deep curiosity about how the human brain supports thought, language, and behavior—and how these capacities develop and adapt across different contexts and populations.

I’m particularly fascinated by how individuals manage complexity: how people interpret layered forms of language such as irony and metaphor, how they allocate limited cognitive resources to handle competing demands, and how intention, motivation, and meaning shape ongoing cognitive processing. My work is inspired by the cognitive neuroscience approach and aims to explore how the brain predicts, updates, and integrates information under uncertainty, especially in dynamic or ambiguous situations.

My current doctoral research revisits the bilingual advantage debate, examining whether and how bilingual experience influences executive attention using large, cross-cultural datasets. More broadly, my interests span executive functioning, language comprehension, and higher-order cognitive processes, focusing on how these mechanisms interact to produce flexible and goal-directed behavior.

I believe that understanding cognition requires an interdisciplinary approach, one that connects neuroscience, psycholinguistics, developmental psychology, and computational methods. I am equally drawn to the applied implications of this work, particularly for understanding neurodevelopmental and clinical populations. At this stage of my research journey, I aim to deepen my methodological expertise in experimental, psychophysiological, and neuroimaging techniques, while remaining open to new questions and directions that advance a more precise understanding of human cognition.