M. Greidanus Romaneli (Miriam) MSc

As a PhD candidate, my research is centered around understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms at play as humans craft and interpret signals (including but not limited to language) to reach mutual understanding. I focus on communicative interactions: situations in which two or more individuals exchange signals, for example, in order to direct each other’s attention to other people or things.

I am interested in how cultural conventions (e.g., the words of a language and their typical meaning), people’s idiosyncratic experiences, and the multiple streams of information we exchange during communicative interaction shape how we attribute meaning to signals. My approach, under the supervision of Dr. Ivan Toni, will involve exploring the links between the structure of signals (e.g. the space of possible signals and the contrasts between them), the structure of meanings (e.g. the representation of concepts relative to each other), and patterns of neural activity (multivariate analyses of fMRI activation during communication).