About me

During my bachelor’s at University College Utrecht, I discovered that next to mathematics, I am also very interested in cognitive neuroscience, psychology and linguistics. That’s why I decided to pursue the Cognitive Neuroscience master’s at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, where I learned more about the cognitive neuroscience of language and communication.

As a researcher, I am passionate about studying how people use language in their daily lives to communicate with others. This mostly happens in face-to-face conversations, in which people communicate with speech, but also with visual bodily signals such as hand gestures. How do these visual signals help us to understand each other better and faster during conversation?

In my PhD, I investigated how seeing communicative hand gestures facilitates language processing during conversation, under supervision of dr. Linda Drijvers and dr. Judith Holler. I focused on hand gestures that depict meaning (for example, pretending to type with two hands in the air to depict the concept of typing). I showed that seeing such hand gestures helps listeners to respond more rapidly to questions (good, because in conversation fast responses are the norm and slow responses are meaningful!). I was also interested in why these gestures speed up responses, and showed that this may be because gestures can be used to predict upcoming words. The full text of my PhD thesis titled “On how gestures facilitate prediction and fast responding during conversation” can be found here.

Since March 2025, I am a postdoc within the Communication in Social Interaction group led by dr. Judith Holler at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition & Behaviour, where I continue to study the role of visual signals during conversation. I use different methods in my research, including (quantitative) corpus analysis, behavioural experiments, electroencephalography, and virtual reality.