Dr M. Faber (Myrthe)

I am a tenure track assistant professor in Communication & Cognition at Tilburg University, and a research affiliate in the Statistical Imaging Neuroscience group led by Dr. Christian Beckmann at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. I also collaborate closely with the Narrative, Cognition, and Communication group at the Radboud University (CLS). I was awarded a 2019 NWO Veni grant for my research project "Drawn in or zoned out? Tracking the wandering mind during reading".


When, why, and how does the mind wander? I am interested in the cognitive and neural underpinnings of mind wandering, in particular in the context of discourse processing. My research focuses on how the environment influences mind wandering, and how brain networks interact to generate spontaneous thoughts. I combine behavioural and neuroimaging research with the development of state-of-the-art analysis methods to measure mind wandering from eye gaze and brain data.

In addition, I have a strong interest in semantic and episodic memory, with a focus on how the architecture of the brain supports (spontaneous) retrieval and consolidation of knowledge and experiences. I therefore study the functional neuroanatomy of language and memory areas in the brain and their development.

Before coming to the Donders Institute as a postdoc, I was a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Notre Dame Department of Psychology, studying mind wandering during text- and film comprehension. I used a combination of behavioral measures, eye tracking, computational methods and content analyses to establish what the environmental conditions are that give rise to mind wandering, and how eye gaze can be used to detect a wandering mind across different tasks.

I obtained a PhD in Psychology from the University of York (UK, 2016). My PhD work examined how we encode events, and how we reconstruct their unfolding, focusing on the role of event structure in duration attribution.