Cecília Hustá

In real-life dialogue, speakers do not wait for others to finish before preparing their own response, they listen and plan simultaneously. My research explores the neural and cognitive mechanisms that support this coordination, focusing on how attention and prediction shape language processing in real time. To study this, I use a combination of behavioral methods and EEG (including RIFT). More specifically, my work focuses on how we balance our attentional resources between comprehension and production and the role uncertainty (as measured by entropy) plays in these processes. 

Currently, I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Psychology of Language Department continuing the research I started during my PhD. As a PhD candidate I carried out my research in the Communicative Brain Group, as well as in my current department, under the supervision of Linda Drijvers and Antje Meyer. My prior research includes work on how context affects conceptual and lexical retrieval (Vitória Piai) and on how attention to specific working memory representations modulate the pupillary light response (Sebastiaan Mathôt). 

Alongside my research at the Max Planck Institute, I served as a PhD representative, organized and taught courses on Best Practices in R and Open Science, led a workshop on how to deal with speech-related artifacts in EEG data, (co)organized the 2022 edition of the IMPRS conference, and contributed several blogs to the TalkLing. I am currently a member of the colloquium committee, coordinating monthly lectures by invited external speakers at the institute.