Job description

I am a cognitive psychologist and an enthusiastic teacher. I teach cognitive psychology, memory theories, and some developmental psychology. 

My research focuses on knowledge representation in humans. Using behavioral and electrophysiological experimental techniques, we investigate the influence of premature birth or asphyxia on language acquisition in infants, and the factors influencing the organization of the early lexical-semantic network. As the effect of a different language developmental trajectory might appear in later learning challenges, the early findings can help in a more effective intervention at the clinics. Furthermore, my research focuses on the role of existing knowledge in learning. With behavioral experimental methods, we studied the role of abstraction in episodic recollection. Revealing the basic mechanism of the automatic, probability-based abstraction process where we find the commonalities among the individual items can teach us about the effectiveness of different learning strategies at school. Our eye-tracking experiments studied the fast and automatic gist extraction process during event perception thereby understanding how the visualization of abstract verbal information is possible during learning.