The Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, in conjunction with the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (both located in Nijmegen), is offering internship positions with a flexible length. As interns, you will join the Communication in Social Interaction (CoSI) Group, led by PI Judith Holler (https://www.mpi.nl/people/holler-judith; https://cosilab.org/).

Requirements:

• Both bachelor’s and master’s students from studies such as Linguistics, Psychology, Communication & Information Studies, Cognitive Neuroscience and Artificial Intelligence or related fields are welcome
• For some projects: Native/proficient speaker of Dutch
• No previous research experience necessary!

In our group, we investigate how people communicate with verbal language, nonverbal vocal behaviour and gesture (manual, head and torso movements, facial signals, and eye gaze) during social interaction. Moreover, we also study the cognitive processes that underpin these behaviours.

Possible projects you could be involved in:
1. Analyzing visual behaviours (such as hand gestures, head gestures, torso movements, or facial signals) and speech (e.g., speaking turns, lexical content, grammatical structure, prosody) in video-audio recorded conversational data. You will learn how to use ELAN, a tool to annotate visual behaviours. If you code speech, you will learn how to use Praat. There is a variety of coding tasks you could be participating in, but most of them focus on identifying the occurrence of visual signals or features of speech, as well as their precise timing.
2. Carrying out experimental studies focusing on the role of visual signals in the comprehension of meaning. For longer term interns, it would be an option to be involved in such studies or to lead them from start to finish, under supervision.

It is also possible to do your bachelor’s or master’s thesis with us, please contact us to discuss this!

If you might be interested: Please contact dr. Judith Holler (judith.holler@mpi.nl)