People
Prof. Dr. Milena Rabovsky, Group leader
Email
Phone: +49 331 977 2703
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.37
Google Scholar
I did my PhD at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (Germany). After research stays at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), Stanford University (USA) and Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), I started as principal investigator and tenure track professor at the University of Potsdam (tenured since 2023). I try to better understand how language processing works in the brain, using neuroscientific evidence and computational modelling (see Overview and Publications, or this video of a recent talk).
Dr. Sophie Jano, Postdoc
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.36
Google Scholar
I recently obtained my PhD from the University of South Australia and now work in the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a postdoctoral researcher. I am deeply interested in prediction in the brain and the effect of prediction on memory encoding. My research specifically focusses on the event-related potentials (ERPs) that may be relevant for this relationship in both linguistic and non-linguistic contexts. Some of my other research interests also relate to individual neural factors, pain perception and false memory.
Dr. Alessandro Lopopolo, Postdoc
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.36
Google Scholar
I have obtained my Ph.D. from the Radboud University Nijmegen (the Netherlands) as part of the Language in Interaction consortium. My research interests focus on applying computational linguistic models to the study of language processing in the brain. I am particularly interested in stochastic language models (both bayesian and neural-based), vector space semantic models, and syntactic parsing. My current work aims to develop and train a connectionist model of sentence comprehension and to use it to investigate how the human brain computes event representations during naturalistic sentence comprehension.
Yana Arkhipova, PhD student
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.09
Google Scholar
I completed my MSc in Language Sciences at UCL (UK) in 2018. Following that, I spent a year working as an intern at MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience lab as a PhD student in December 2019 to work on a project investigating the intricacies of the N400's functional significance.
Friederike Contier, PhD student
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.10
Personal Website, Google Scholar
I studied linguistics with some cultural studies, literature, and psychology on the side (Frankfurt(Oder)/Malmo/Erfurt). Research traineeships at the MPI CBS (Leipzig) and for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen) sparked my interest in language processing and the question how it’s intertwined with other aspects of cognition. In my PhD project, I look at the P600 component during language comprehension to investigate attention-related processes in (re-)building sentence meaning.
Sertug Gürel, PhD student
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.10
In my master’s studies, I became interested in computational neuroscience and cognitive modeling. After I finished my master’s degree in neuroscience, I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a Ph.D. student. In my research, I focus on understanding the type of linguistic information processed by the deep learning language models’ inner layers. I’m also interested in how the information we get from language models can increase our understanding of language processing in the brain.
Siddharth Gupta, PhD student
Email
Campus Golm, bldg. 14, room 4.10
Github
I completed my master’s in Cognitive Science at IIT Delhi (India) in 2023. In February 2024, I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a PhD student, having previously worked in the lab during my master’s internship. Besides, I also have an engineering degree in computer science and experience with NLP. I am interested in computational modeling of language and its application to understanding human sentence comprehension. Currently, I am working on a project that investigates a probable relationship between a model of sentence comprehension and reading times.
Alumni
Dr. Kate Stone, Postdoc in the lab, now Lecturer at the University of Hull, UK
Personal Website, Google Scholar
I did my PhD in the Vasishth Lab at the University of Potsdam (Germany). My research interests are in probabilistic sentence processing and how uncertainty and conflict affect readers' linguistic expectations. I use EEG and computational modelling to examine how these expectations unfold over time.
Dr. Alma Lindborg, Postdoc in the lab, now Machine Learning Researcher at ai|coustics
My research interest lies in investigating the role of probabilistic representations and prediction in perception and cognition. I did my PhD in applied mathematics at the Technical University of Denmark, in which I investigated analogies between brain activity and Bayesian models of multisensory perception. In my postdoc project, I investigate the role of probabilistic representations in language comprehension using deep learning and EEG.
Alice Hodapp, PhD student in the lab, now Postdoc at NeuroSpin, Paris
Google Scholar
After completing a master’s degree in psychology (Halle/Budapest/Leipzig), I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a PhD student to focus on prediction (-errors) in language processing. My research mainly uses EEG with a focus on the N400 ERP component. I am also interested in how comprehenders use prediction errors to make better predictions in the future, what influences these predictions and errors, and which neuromodulators are involved in the process.
Dorottya Flóra Czárán, Student assistant
I am a master's student in psychology at the University of Potsdam. From the beginning of my studies I have had a strong interest in human cognition and the underlying brain mechanisms. Having learned about computational modelling work and EEG experiments of language processing and learning narrowed my focus on this field. That's why I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab to write my master's thesis and as a student assistant.
Lok Yan Lam, Student assistant
I am a fourth year student in Bachelor of Psychology at the University of Potsdam. Being interested in EEG experiments and analyses, I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab since February 2022 to assist in a project investigating the effect of transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation on the P600 component.
Jonathan Zoff, Student assistant
Because of my interest in human cognition and biology I decided to study psychology. I am now a bachelor's student at the University of Potsdam. After partaking in experiments and hearing lectures about biology and the human brain I decided to start working at the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a student assistant to further learn about EEG and experimentation.
Antonia Heinrich, Student assistant
I am a third year student in Psychology at the Universität Potsdam. My study interest primarily lies in the field of biopsychology and cognitive neuroscience. I am also into interdisciplinary approaches, combining biological and computational perspectives.
Jasmin Barthelmeß, Student assistant
I just completed my BSc in Psychology at the University of Potsdam. For my bachelor thesis I already worked in the lab, using EEG with a focus on the N400 ERP component. In my work I was interested in the sensitivity of the N400 regarding the Cloze Probability of verbs and the processes behind it. After finishing my bachelors I was still interested to learn more about language processing, therefore I joined the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab as a student assistant in February 2023.
