Newcomer: Jonas Noelle

Jonas Nölle is a cognitive scientist and evolutionary linguist who mainly uses lab experiments to study meaning-making in situated interaction and the evolution of communication systems. He has used experimental semiotics approaches, including silent gesture and iterated learning, to study how communication systems evolve culturally in response to cognitive, communicative, and environmental factors. He has previously worked at the Interacting Minds Centre in Denmark and the Centre for Language Evolution at Edinburgh, where he completed his PhD in 2021 and innovated the use of virtual reality (VR) to study these phenomena in ecologically more valid lab settings. Most recently, he worked on the FACESYNTAX project at the University of Glasgow, where he studied psychophysics and generative models of facial expressions to investigate how they combine with and modulate speech in multimodal communication across cultures. At the MLD here at the MPI, he plans to continue his research into multimodality (speech, facial expressions, gestures) and language evolution using innovative and interactive lab paradigms relying on VR and other technologies.

Link to his work.