Writer Steven Pinker is an American cognitive psychologist, linguist, and popular science author. He is Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind. Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. He has written several books on language and cognition, including The Language Instinct, Words and Rules, The Blank Slate, and The Better Angels of Our Nature.