About me

I’m a computational cognitive scientist who researches the interplay between language, inference, social cognition, and social interaction. I’m currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, with Andrea Martin, Iris van Rooij and Mark Blokpoel, on a project that aims to explain fast and flexible linguistic inference in humans by building a computational cognitive model that takes into account plausibility constraints (tractability and what we know about neural systems) from the get-go. This is a subproject of Big Question 5 of the Language in Interaction Consortium. I am a member of the Language and Computation in Neural Systems group led by Andrea Martin, as well as the Computational Cognitive Science group led by Iris van Rooij. Find my CV here.

Language use relies on (i) flexible inferencing skills (e.g. to combine linguistic knowledge and background knowledge to infer the meaning of a novel word like mask-shaming); (ii) socio-cognitive skills such as theory of mind (e.g., to decide whether to talk about the house or a house), and (iii) interactional skills (e.g., to ask for clarification). I use computational modelling to tackle challenging questions about these capacities and their interplay.

Watch a 15-min talk about my research programme below: