Max van Duijn

As principal investigator I supervise the project I, but you will also see me giving story workshops and presenting results at conferences. My goal is to unravel children's mindreading skills as apparent in their narratives, using an approach that combines methods from the humanities and computer science.

Bram van Dijk 

As collaborating PhD student on this project, I do data collection and analysis of stories with tools from Natural Language Processing (NLP). My background is in Philosophy of Science and Social Science. 

Werner de Valk

I collaborate on this project as researcher. Drawing on a background in art and cognitive science, I (re)designed various clinical mindreading tasks both visually and textually, and designed a public science event for the project (see the 'Events' tab!).


Lola Vandame

After a multidisciplinary background in cognitive sciences at McGill University, I am now pursuing my master's in applied cognitive psychology at Utrecht University. Having interests in social cognition and Theory of Mind, I joined the CIL to collaborate on the "A Telling Story project".

Li Kloostra

Having recently finished the research Master Linguistics (Utrecht University), I am now working as an associate researcher on the "A Telling Story" project. Within this project, I focus on children's use of emotional language to investigate socio-cognitive competence and the link with Theory of Mind. 

Former team members:

Isabelle Blok

Isabelle was involved from the very start of the project when it was still a pilot study (early 2019). She helped with setting up the project protocol, data collection infrastructure, and did many story workshops in day cares and schools.

Yasemin Tunbul

Yasemin was like Isabelle involved in the early stage of the project. She introduced the storytelling workshop into the community centre she was involved, assisted with the workshop in many schools and transcribed a lot of stories.

Nikita Ham

Nikita worked in 2021 in the project and assisted with collecting stories, but also transcribed a lot of stories. She also designed promotional materials for the project, such as a news letter and story book.

Iris Jansen

Iris helped us with collecting data by establishing conections with schools in the south of The Netherlands and transcribing stories.