Bálint Forgács
Experimental Psychologist & Cognitive Scientist
News
In July 2023 I have received the Bolyai scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences for a three-year period to study whether infants process language mentalistically.
In June 2023 I have started a two-year part-time postdoc at the FU Berlin, where we are going to study visual metaphor processing using fMRI with Prof. Arthur Jacobs and Prof. Radek Cichy.
Intro
I am an associate professor at Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE), Budapest, working in the Babylab of the Department of Cognitive Psychology, where I am the lab manager of the EEG lab of the Babylab and lead the Language and Brain Research Group. Currently I am also a postdoctoral researcher at the Freie Universität Berlin for two years starting from June 2023.
My research has two main threads. I investigate the interaction between social cognition, Theory-of-Mind and language acquisition, by studying early communicative-pragmatic skills in infants using neuroscientific methods like EEG. I am also exploring, in adults, the neurocognitive mechanisms of the comprehension of metaphorical expressions using EEG and the processing of pictorial visual metaphors using fMRI. The overarching theme is how language is used as a communicative tool in social situations, how meaning is born out of communicative intentions, and how language comprehension is implemented in the human brain.