About

The CoSI group investigates human verbal and visual language in social interaction, with a focus on hand, head and torso movements, facial signals, and eye gaze, as well as the cognitive processes that underpin these behaviours. With our research, we address questions fundamental to our understanding of how we act and interact as social beings, such as:

How do we use words and visual signals to convey our intentions to others and which processes and mechanisms underpin this multimodal behaviour?
How do we comprehend multimodal utterances and how do social and interactive processes influence comprehension?
How do we use our bodies to achieve mutual understanding in conversation, and how do addressees contribute to this process?
How do individual differences influence how we draw on different modalities to communicate?
How does neurodiversity impact on multimodal language use and perception?
How has human multimodal communication evolved?

To answer these questions, the group combines approaches from various scientific disciplines, including psycholinguistics, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, social psychology and cognitive neuroscience, as well as a host of different methods, ranging from experiments to corpus studies, and often combining them.

The group is headed by Prof. Judith Holler, Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Radboud University, and Senior Investigator at the Multimodal Language Department of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics.