Research Assistant

Radboud University logo - Research Assistant at the Donders Centre for Cognition: Theoretical Modelling of Conversational Repair
Employment 0.75 - 0.8 FTE
Gross monthly salary € 3,202 - € 4,159
Required background Research University Degree
Organizational unit Faculty of Social Sciences
Application deadline 22 September 2026
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Do you want to understand the cognitive processes underlying everyday conversation? As a research assistant, you will critically evaluate cognitive theories and use computational modelling to formalise hypotheses about conversational repair.
Human conversations are remarkably flexible. To make that possible, people do much visible 'work' to keep conversations on track and quickly resolve breakdowns in communication. For example, by asking for clarification (known as ' conversational repair' ) when your conversation partner unexpectedly changes topic. However, there is much we do not yet understand about the invisible work that people do, inside their minds, to resolve such communicative breakdowns. This project aims to explore this gap by investigating the cognitive capacities that underlie this ability through computational cognitive modelling.
You will work together with Dr Marieke Woensdregt to elaborate and further specify an existing formalisation sketch that was developed as part of the Master's thesis project of Ana Luísa Valladares Lanza Guimarães, MSc. This formalisation sketch was developed to outline which components are involved in the cognitive capacity for initiating repair in response to an unexpected topic shift in conversation. This research assistantship forms part of a research project that focuses on conversational context (i.e. what was said before) and how that plays a role in shaping expectations. The goal is to formalise and evaluate hypotheses about how previous utterances might shape expectations about what type of utterance is likely to follow next (e.g. somethi...