After doing a research master’s, I became a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in Psychology. I’m investigating how conceptual processing (i.e., understanding the meaning of words) is supported by linguistic and sensorimotor brain systems. I use methods such as behavioural and electroencephalographic experiments, corpus analysis, statistics and programming. My CV is available.

• Cognitive psychology and neuroscience
• Psycholinguistics
• Semantic / conceptual processing
• Statistics
• Open science
• Programming

The linguistic and sensorimotor bases of semantic processing: Variation across individuals, words and tasks

Conceptual processing has been found to draw on two cognitive systems. One is a linguistic system, which is based on knowledge of words and the relations among them. The other is a sensorimotor system, which draws on our perceptual, motor and affective experience. These two systems contribute to conceptual processing in a sequential manner: the linguistic system is activated first, providing more superficial semantic information, with the sensorimotor system slower to reach peak activation, but providing more refined meaning. We know that the relative importance of each system is modulated by contextual factors (e.g., linguistic context, processing goals, cognitive resources). However, we know much less about how people’s individual cognitive capacities and experience (reading experience, reasoning ability) interact with these systems, which has become a central theme in my work. 

Much evidence has been found in cognitive psychology for the role of linguistic systems (based on statistical regularities in how words co-occur in language) and sensorimotor systems (based on perceptual, motor, affective experience). The linguistic system is consistently linked to faster, more superficial processing, while the sensorimotor system is linked to slower, more cognitively demanding tasks (Connell & Lynott, 2013; Louwerse et al., 2015). Recent evidence suggests that individual differences, such as measures of reading experience (e.g., Pexman & Yap, 2018) and of sensorimotor experience (Beilock, et al., 2008; Vukovic & Williams, 2015), provide additional explanatory power for accounts of embodied cognition. For example, linguistic individual differences in vocabulary predict word recognition and information processing speed (Yap et al., 2012). Likewise, sensorimotor individual differences in spatial perspective-taking are also implicated in semantic processing, as participants who tend to naturally adopt an internal perspective in space are more likely to engage in perceptual simulation when reading, by identifying themselves as the protagonist (Vukovic & Williams, 2015). 

My PhD scholarship is teaching-based, which means that I contribute to my department’s curriculum for 180 hours a year. Each year, I have led 30 seminars and marked 80 essays in developmental, cognitive and social psychology, while also helping in 30 statistics labs. This activity is detailed below.

In addition, I was a representative for graduate teaching assistants in my department for a year.

I am also a Certified Carpentries Instructor and I have led several workshops on data analysis using R. Earlier in my career, I taught English to secondary-education students, and Spanish to adults.

Curriculum Vitae

Google Scholar

Research materials on OSF

Github

Other writings

• Event-related potentials: Why and how I used them

• Review of the Landscape Model of reading: composition, dynamics and application

• The case for data dashboards—first steps in R Shiny

• Naive principal component analysis using R

• Dutch modality exclusivity norms

Web applications and dashboards

• Web application for the simulation of experimental data

• Dutch modality exclusivity norms (in case of downtime, please see alternative)

• ERP waveforms from psycholinguistic experiment (in case of downtime, please see alternative)

Videos

• Workshop on R Markdown, dashboards and Binder
  (see programme and materials)

• Presentation of experimental procedure

• Personal profile and experience at Lancaster U. Psychology Dept.

• Part of application for software-related fellowship

• Part of application for research funding

Research Master Language and Communication - Tilburg University and Radboud University (Netherlands), 2017

• Thesis
• Stimulus norming study
• Further research

BA English Philology - Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), 2013

Further courses

Advanced R programming - Coursera / Johns Hopkins University, 2017

Improving your statistical inferences - Coursera / Eindhoven University of Technology, 2017

Big data in society - Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, 2016

Introduction to cognitive neuroscience - Radboud University, 2016

Linear mixed-effects models in R - Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, 2016

Statistics: analyzing in R - Radboud University, 2016

Transcranial brain stimulation - Radboud University, 2015

Neurobiology of language - Netherlands Graduate School of Linguistics, 2015

Skills