Research labs
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).
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.
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.
Data-driven virtue epistemology Lab
CONTACT
Prof. Marcin Miłkowski
marcin.milkowski@gmail.com
DESCRIPTION
We focus on text mining in the service of philosophy of science in practice. This is known as a branch of digital philosophy. 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 want to both collect large corpora and process them to gain insights into various theoretical virtues and vices of artifacts and cognitive operations performed with them.
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.
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.
Formal Linguistics Lab
CONTACT
Prof. Adam Przepiórkowski
a.przepiorkowski@uw.edu.pl
DESCRIPTION
This research lab investigates syntactic and semantic properties of particular natural languages (Polish, Russian, Turkish, Kazakh…) and those of Language (with the capital L), understood as a manifestation of human genetic endowment.
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.
Laboratory of Experimental Philosophy KogniLab
CONTACT
Dr Katarzyna Kuś
kkus@uw.edu.pl
DESCRIPTION
Our inquiries are inspired by the longing for critical reflection over the methodological basis of so called experimental philosophy, which is a tendency to ‘test’ the hypotheses with respect to their concepts, the logical structure of their sentences or to the validity of their inference, and with reference to linguistic competences of an average language user. The philosophical significance of these findings is being heatedly discussed, needless to say, often way too off the mark. Its critiques disagree with the very idea of philosophical theory being vulnerable to empirical findings, for in their eyes, philosophy is all about possibilities (or even necessities). We find them wrong.
We believe that philosophy shall describe the world as it is, and that the philosopher must take facts into account. We also find it efficient to consider empirical findings, particularly psychological or linguistical ones, in the process of philosophical argumentation (especially when it comes to philosophy of language and cognition). Overall, we share the assumptions of experimental philosophy.
Yet, we recognize the boldness of many experimental philosophers whose interpretations of the data seem far-fetched. In fact, some of it is only aimed at limiting the scope of the traditional philosophy. Our goal is to conduct empirical research combined with a ‘minimalistic’ approach to setting those limits. We seek to investigate – via means of empirical research – what is really being imposed by the facts, and what is but a pretentious empirical claim. After all, we do believe that some of the scientific discoveries demand changes in contemporary philosophical theories, but we are also well aware that many allegedly sensational results are actually in accordance with what philosophers had claimed.
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?
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,
- generative linguistic formalisms, esp., HPSG and LFG.
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.
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.