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Participation in the work of the chosen Research lab (the supervisor and their team): developing methods, research tools, planning experiments, collecting data, analysing and writing up results etc. Activities needed to complete Research lab I exclude students’ work on their own research projects (i.e., Master’s thesis).

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Formal Linguistics Lab

CONTACT

Prof. Adam Przepiórkowski
a.przepiorkowski@uw.edu.pl 

DESCRIPTION

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Laboratory of Experimental Philosophy KogniLab: Exploring the Empirical Foundations of Thought

CONTACT

Dr Katarzyna Kuś
kkus@uw.edu.pl 

DESCRIPTION

At the Laboratory of Experimental Philosophy KogniLab, we’re driven by a commitment to rigorously examine the empirical underpinnings of philosophical inquiry. Our core mission is to critically reflect on the methodological foundations of experimental philosophy, a vibrant field that seeks to test hypotheses concerning concepts, the logical structure of sentences, or the validity of inferences, often by drawing on the linguistic intuitions and competences of everyday language users. While the philosophical significance of these empirical findings is a subject of intense debate—and, we believe, often misconstrued by critics—we firmly contend that philosophy must engage with the world as it is.

We believe that philosophers must take facts into account. This conviction leads us to actively integrate empirical findings, particularly from psychology and linguistics, into our philosophical argumentation. This approach is especially fruitful in the philosophy of language and cognition. While we share the fundamental assumptions of experimental philosophy, we’re also acutely aware of the tendency for some interpretations of empirical data to be overly ambitious or even aimed at unduly restricting the scope of traditional philosophy.

Current Activities and Research Themes

Our current work focuses on conducting empirical research while maintaining a “minimalistic” approach to setting the boundaries of philosophical inquiry. We use rigorous empirical methods to discern what facts truly impose on philosophical theories versus what constitutes an overreaching empirical claim. We are actively engaged in projects that explore:

• Logic of Non-Doxastic Attitudes and Free Choice: We investigate how people understand and infer about beliefs and other mental states that aren’t truth-apt, while simultaneously analyzing how these attitudes influence our understanding of “free choice inferences” – for example, interpreting the sentence “You can eat an apple or a pear” as offering a free choice of both options.
• The impact of linguistic framing on moral judgments: We investigate how the way information is linguistically presented can subtly yet significantly alter individuals’ epistemic and ethical evaluations and decisions.
• Meta-Analysis of Philosophical Intuitions: This project leverages meta-analysis, a statistical technique, to systematically summarize and analyze results from multiple experimental philosophy studies. Our primary goal is to rigorously determine how people’s philosophical intuitions vary across different factors like culture, age, or education, and to understand the impact of surprising influences such as scenario presentation order. Based on our findings, we aim to develop best practices for reporting experimental philosophy results to facilitate future meta-analyses and to create comprehensive guidelines for conducting and describing meta-analyses specifically tailored to experimental philosophy, thereby enhancing the field’s methodological rigor and the reliability of its findings.

We firmly believe that some scientific discoveries necessitate revisions to contemporary philosophical theories. However, we are also dedicated to demonstrating that many supposedly sensational empirical results are, in fact, consistent with established philosophical claims. Our goal is to bridge the gap between empirical science and philosophical reflection, fostering a nuanced understanding of how each informs the other.

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The MIND Lab UW

CONTACT

Dr Agnieszka Pluta
apluta@psych.uw.edu.pl

DESCRIPTION

We are a group of researchers from University of Warsaw (Faculty of Psychology) and Bioimaging Research Center (World Hearing Center). Our project seeks to answer the most pressing question in the recent theory of mind research, namely, what is the relation between explicit and implicit false belief mentalizing. In our research, we use functional near infrared spectroscopy – fNIRS to investigate brain functions underlying the ToM development and fMRI add resting-state fMRI to parcelete the social network in the brain.

In parallel, through the SYNCC-IN project, we are investigating Biobehavioral Synchrony—the natural coordination of biological and behavioral rhythms between individuals, which plays a key role in social connection, empathy, and bonding. Using advanced methods including fNIRS, EEG, and Eye Tracking, we study how synchrony in brain activity, physiology, and behavior unfolds in various social contexts and supports mental health. The EU-funded SYNCC-IN project aims to boost sustainable collaboration in this field between the University of Warsaw and four partner universities, reinforcing our leadership and research capacity in the European Research Area. A Virtual Laboratory for Bio-behavioural Synchrony and knowledge exchange among institutions will further drive innovation and excellence in this emerging field.

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BabyLab

CONTACT
Prof. Przemysław Tomalski
ptomalski@psych.pan.pl 

DESCRIPTION

The main goal of the lab is to study infant behaviour in order to better understand the mechanisms of early human development. During the first year of life infants discover the basic laws of physics and begin to understand the first words. They learn to regulate their attention, emotions and behaviour in various situations, gradually developing remarkable self-regulatory skills. The aim of the lab’s research is to better understand how each infant shapes his/her own unique pathway of development. In particular, we study the impact of early experience on developmental outcomes. In future this knowledge could be used to develop new screening tools and early intervention programs for infants.

In the Babylab, a variety of methods and techniques are used. Monitoring eye movements with eye-tracking, while the baby watches videos, informs us about the dynamics of infant visual attention (what he/she looks at, when and for how long). Parent-infant play is observed to find out more about the development of communicative and self-regulatory skills in infancy. Movement extraction methods are applied to quantify movement and its relation to developmental skills later in life. Also, different toys and questionnaires are used to study general infant development.

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Cognitive Metascience Lab

CONTACT
Prof. Marcin Miłkowski
marcin.milkowski@gmail.com

DESCRIPTION

We focus on cognitive underpinnings of how researchers reflect upon their own practice, the study of which we call “cognitive metascience”. One of our tools is text mining in the service of metascience. In particular, we want to analyze virtues and vices of various cognitive artifacts as prevalent in diverse kinds of scientific writing (from publications, through tweets, and peer reviews to project proposals). As a consequence, we collect large corpora and process them to gain insights into various theoretical virtues and vices of artifacts and cognitive operations performed with them.

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MultiLADA Lab

CONTACT

Prof. Ewa Haman
ewa.haman@psych.uw.edu.pl
Dr Grzegorz Krajewski
krajewski@psych.uw.edu.pl 

DESCRIPTION

In research projects that we are currently conducting, we cooperate with researchers from Polish institutions: the Institute of Psychology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the University of Finance and Management in Warsaw, as well as Norwegian institutions: Oslo Metropolitan University (OsloMet), Universitetet i Oslo, Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences, and British institutions: Lancaster University, University of Cambridge. We also have experience in cooperation in international COST networking programs: A33, IS0804, IS1306, IS1406. International cooperation is important for our team because studies of bi- and multilingual language development should include both languages of the child and the two languages should be analyzed in a similar manner. We co-created and still co-create various tools for assessing language in multilingual children: LITMUS-CLT, LITMUS-SRep, LITMUS-MAIN. We use these tools in our own studies and lend them to other researchers for scientific purposes. We are currently carrying out two research projects with external funding: StarWords (NCN – OPUS programme) and PolkaNorski (NCN – GRIEG programme, financed by the Norway Grants). We also co-create Action II.3.7 „Multilingualism” under the strategic program of the University of Warsaw: Excellence Initiative – Research University and we participate in another strategic program of the University of Warsaw: Alliance 4EU+, under which we participate in the European Network for Psycholinguistic Research on Multilingualism and Multilingual Development.

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Conceptual Development Lab

CONTACT

Prof. Maciej Haman
maciej.haman@psych.uw.edu.pl

DESCRIPTION

The main area of our interest is the formation of basic conceptual representations, especially in the understanding and processing numbers and „Theory of mind” in the preschool period of 3-6 years. However, other areas of basic conceptual knowledge (space, „naive biology”, perception of objects and their movement) and other age groups (from infancy to adults) and populations (e.g., children at risk of autism or with specific mathematical problems) are also within the scope of our interests and we are happy to include them in our projects. We are currently focusing on fNIRS neuroimaging research, but we also conduct classic behavioral and eyetracking research.

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Human Interactivity and Language Lab

CONTACT

Prof. Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi
raczasze@psych.uw.edu.pl 
Dr Julian Zubek
j.zubek@uw.edu.pl

DESCRIPTION

Our lab gathers people interested in the importance of interactivity for human cognition. We study basic and natural (physical, situated, embodied and value-laden) interactions of people with each other and with the world, seeking in them both sources and motivations for cognitive processes and structures.

As the most important, fascinating and difficult problem we consider how from such interactions structured patterns, such as language, emerge, stabilize and change, making cognition collective in many ways and over many time-scales: evolutionary, cultural, developmental, ‘social’ & on-line.

Our main theoretical and methodological inspirations come from dynamical systems approaches to living systems and cognition, ecological and enactive psychology, and semiotics, as a pragmatic frame helpful for discovering meaningful relations that form the infrastructure for symbolic systems.

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Let’s talk Bilingualism Lab

CONTACT

Dr Kalinka Timmer
kalinka.timmer@psych.uw.edu.pl

DESCRIPTION

My main research interest is multilingualism. With neurophysiological methods, I test the impact of the environment on the ease with which multilinguals switch between their languages. During their everyday conversations, multilinguals can employ each language to different degrees. This can, for example, depend on whom multilinguals are speaking to. How does the brain adjust to these different language environments to achieve successful communication? Not only do bilingual conversations occur in different situations, but other activities unrelated to language also occur in various situations (e.g., driving on a highway or downtown). Is the neural plasticity during bilingual conversations an example of domain-general abilities or a different language-specific ability?

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Linguistic Engineering Group

CONTACT

Dr Alina Wróblewska
alina@ipipan.waw.pl
Prof. Agnieszka Mykowiecka
agnieszka.mykowiecka@ipipan.waw.pl
Dr Łukasz Kobyliński
lkobylinski@ipipan.waw.pl

DESCRIPTION

The main research areas of the Group:

• (Polish) corpus linguistics (National Corpus of Polish),
• morphosyntactic tagging and lemmatisation of Polish,
• syntactic and semantic parsing of Polish,
• extraction of linguistic knowledge from corpora,
• information extraction,
• distributional semantics and compositional distributional semantics,
• sentiment analysis,
• credibility assessment of online content.

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Social Neuroscience Lab

CONTACT

Prof. Łukasz Okruszek
lukasz.okruszek@psych.uw.edu.pl 

DESCRIPTION

The goal of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory team at IP PAN is to understand the neural and behavioral processes that allow us to capture and interpret what other people think, feel and do. In our current research projects, we are trying to answer the question of what factors influence our ability to process social information and the accompanying brain activity. Our research involves both healthy individuals and patients with various neuropsychiatric disorders, so we can better understand the factors that shape our social functioning. Our research interests focus on the impact of feelings of loneliness (or ‘subjective social isolation’) on the cognitive and physiological mechanisms involved in so-called social cognition.

To better understand how our perception of the social world translates into physiological mechanisms, our work combines a variety of research methods, including behavioral and neuropsychological methods, neuroimaging (fMRI), neuro- (EEG) and psychophysiological (ECG) methods, non-invasive brain stimulation techniques (transcranial current stimulation) and measurement techniques in everyday situations using so-called wearable devices.