Newcomer: David Hernández Gutiérrez

David Hernández Gutiérrez is a cognitive neuroscientist interested in the neural correlates of naturalistic audiovisual language processing. He has just returned to Europe after a postdoctoral position at the University of Rochester's Lalor Lab in New York. Prior to that, he was a postdoctoral researcher at the BCBL in San Sebastián, where he worked with Nicola Molinaro.

His research focuses on understanding how our brains dynamically represent speakers' bodily signals and how these signals influence different levels of the linguistic hierarchy. To address these questions, he uses a combination of EEG, MEG, computational linguistics, body-motion tracking, and neural predictive modelling.

At the MPI for Psycholinguistics, David is joining the CoSI Lab and the Multimodal Language Department to pursue an exciting and ambitious Marie Skłodowska-Curie project supervised by Judith Holler and co-supervised by Aslı Özyürek, in collaboration with Linda Drijvers and Uta Noppeney. The project, BrainDial – Brain Dynamics of Audiovisual Dialogue, aims to extend his previous research on continuous audiovisual language processing to conversational contexts, with a particular focus on facial communicative cues and gestures. Ultimately, they hope to better understand how the brain represents these signals by taking into account the pragmatic nature of conversational interactions and their potential predictive role in language comprehension.