Falk Huettig

Falk Huettig is a Senior Investigator at the MPI and Professor of Psycholinguistics and Cultural Cognition at Radboud University Nijmegen.

He heads the Cultural Brain Group.

Human cognition, and therefore the brain, is a product of both the cultural environment in which we are immersed and our genetic makeup. Huettig explores how cultural inventions like written words, numbers, music, and belief systems shape the mind and brain from the beginning of our lives. Looking at the Literate Brain, the Predictive Brain, and the Multimodal Brain offers him a window into the culturally-shaped mind. Diverse groups, such as illiterates in India, young children, individuals with reading disorders and highly educated individuals take part in his studies. He uses behavioural and electrophysiological measures, and functional and structural neuroimaging techniques. In essence, he asks to what extent culture determines what it means to think as a human.