Predictions everywhere: visiting the Predictive Brain lab in Nijmegen

Thanks to the very generous LuCiD travel grant, I was able to visit the Donders Institute in Nijmegen last year. The whole institute is a fascinating place, focusing on cognitive neuroscience and pioneering the most novel techniques in neuroimaging. It even looks a bit like a UFO, with a bright red room in the middle, where institute-wide talks take place.

I spent most of my visit talking to the members of the Predictive Brain Lab (PBL), which brings together researchers working on prediction from many different angles, from vision to hearing and of course language. A lot of their current work is absolutely fascinating, especially studies looking at prediction in naturalistic environments, such as while watching a movie or listening to a new language for the first time as an adult. It was very exciting to talk to people who use such different methods and perspectives to look at predictions, a topic I’ve been interested in for a very long time. It was especially worthwhile to present my LuCiD-based research here, the comments and questions I received were very different from when the audience mostly works on language and development!

This visit was very inspiring and really made me think about the future directions my own research on language acquisition could take. It was also fortunate as I took the opportunity to come back and join the PBL this year, with the aim of combining my previous behavioral work on language acquisition with the state-of-the art techniques used in the lab. I will be using neuroimaging to learn more about how different kinds of predictions can aid various areas of language acquisition. While there’s a lot to learn, I’m really enjoying the challenge and reconnecting with the people I met last year.

However, joining the PBL sadly means that I have had to say goodbye to the LuCiD community that has been my research home for so many years. This is very bittersweet, as I met so many wonderful people and learned so much from my colleagues during my years in Liverpool and Manchester. So I wanted to use this space to thank you all, say goodbye, and hopefully see you soon!