Projects

The age of information overload: how do we control what we say?

This research is funded by a Veni grant (€320,000) from the Dutch Research Council (NWO).

We have all been there: you are in the middle of saying something, and suddenly a notification pops up on your phone. Your attention shifts momentarily and you lose track of what you were going to say. In our information-saturated world, it is challenging to avoid all the distractions surrounding us while speaking. To maintain focus while translating thoughts into words, speakers need cognitive control to constantly update the content of planned speech and prevent distractions. The failure of control leads to communication difficulties, a challenge exacerbated in educational or clinical settings (e.g., ADHD). Understanding how we control our language is not only important for theories of language, but also for gaining fundamental insights into the human brain and cognition.

When speaking in a rich linguistic context, working memory (WM) plays a critical role in language control by updating and maintaining contextual information. To understand how we control what we say, the current project investigates how WM regulates the information flow during speaking, connecting language comprehension to production. Recent developments in cognitive neuroscience provide a great opportunity to address this question: a fronto-striatal neural network has been proposed for gating task-relevant information in WM. By operating the “gates” of WM, our brain controls what information is allowed to enter and to be maintained in WM, providing contextual support for action. To advance our knowledge about the cognitive control processes in speaking, I take an interdisciplinary approach, leveraging my research background in cognitive control, speech production, and cognitive neuroscience.

(figure generated by AI tool “Bing Image Creator”)

Neural Mechanisms of Generalization and Novel Inference

This research is funded by the Dutch Research Council NWO (Gravitation grant to the Language in Interaction Consortium).

The ability to generalize previously learned information to novel situations is fundamental for adaptive behavior. When seeing the word “un-reject-able-ish” for the first time, one can quickly infer its meaning by generalizing the knowledge of its constituent parts and integrating them based on certain abstract structural rules (e.g., the sequential order of the word parts). How do we generate novel, compositional meaning? What are the neuro-computational mechanisms that underlie structural inference in not only meaning generalization but also across different cognitive domains? This efficient but also flexible inferential process may leverage neural mechanisms commonly studied in the nonlinguistic domains of action planning, relational memory and model-based reinforcement learning, including medial prefrontal-hippocampal circuitry. To address these questions, I have developed novel experimental paradigms for quantifying novel structural inference. I use neuroimaging techniques (e.g., fMRI, MEG) to probe the neural underpinning of the learning and generalization processes. I also collaborate on a pharmacological study to access dopamine’s role in supporting such flexible behavior.

(graffiti made by X.Y.Zheng & W.P.S.Cames van Batenburg)

Control and Monitoring in Bilingual Speech Production

This research is funded by an internal PhD grant from the Donders Institute for Brain Cognition and Behaviour.

Although bilingual speakers are very good at selectively using one language rather than another, sometimes language intrusion occurs (e.g., a Dutch-English bilingual says “where is my fiets” to her English-speaking friend when she finds her bike stolen). In my PhD project, I consider language intrusion to be a failure of the control system, and investigated how and why such disturbance of the control process takes place. To this end, I employed behavioral and electrophysiological experiments to examine the role of top-down control in language switching, the functional locus of language selection, the monitoring process of speech errors, and the dynamics of inhibitory control during language mixing. As a successful attempt to study the language control mechanism from a non-traditional perspective (i.e., by looking into the actual errors), the knowledge gained in this project significantly contributes to the research of language control, language production, and bilingualism. It also goes beyond the domain of language and provides new insights on research on e.g., performance monitoring, task switching and general cognitive control.

(illustration made by X.Y.Zheng & W.P.S.Cames van Batenburg)