Dr. Jan Antfolk is a professor of Psychology at Åbo Akademi, Finland. His research spans across different topics, including kin-selection, genomic conflict, study of human sexual behavior and cognitive psychology. He has collaborated in several meta-analytical reviews, including ones pertaining to questions about the bilingual advantage, the bilingual lexical deficit, and language training in post-aphasic patients.

Dr. Antfolk's will give a methods-focused talk titled "Multi-level Meta-analyses for Quasi-Experimental Designs Typically Used in Language and Cognitive Sciences".

Dr. Herbert Clark is a psycholinguist and Professor of Psychology at Stanford University. He has written seminal work on the cognitive and social processes involved in language use and how interlocutors use shared knowledge to understand each other during conversation.

Dr. Clark will talk on the issue of how studies on cognitive processing that involve two or more people often involve confederates (i.e. experimenters who interact with the participant). He will argue that this method can mislead researchers and result in inaccurate conclusions.

Dr. Håkan Fisher is a psychologist and professor at Stockholm University. Dr. Fisher focuses on cognitive, affective, social, and perceptual processing differences within and between subjects. He has used multiple brain imaging methods, including fMRI, PET, and fNIRS, to provide insights into the relationship between behavior and brain function in adults. 

Dr. Fisher's talk focuses on the implementation of single N-designs in neuroimaging reserach.

Dr. T Florian Jaeger is a professor at University of Rochester and has a multi-disciplinary research profile in adaptive speech perception, communicatively efficient language production, linguistic evolution, and computational models of cognition. 

Dr. Jaeger will talk about the strengths and limitations of modeling. He'll focus on how clarity of linking assumptions enhances our thinking and supports scientific progress. He'll also talk about how the need to make things tractable for modeling holds us back, e.g., by limited ecological validity.

Dr. Chigusa Kurumada is a professor at the University of Rochester, focusing on pragmatic and prosodic dimensions of language. She heads the Rochester Kinder Lab which conducts studies in language learning, comprehension, and production in both neurotypical and neurodivergent populations.  

Dr. Kurumada will lead the discussion session for the symposium's morning theme: "Small- vs. large-scale data"

Dr. Mats Nilsson is a professor of Psychology at Stockholm University. Dr. Nilsson's award-winning research has contributed to the study of psychoacoustics and epidemiology of noise. Dr. Nilsson also specializes in research methods for behavioral sciences.

Dr. Nilssons talk revolves around the implementation of single N-designs in behavioral studies.

Dr. Timo Roettger is a cognitive researcher and professor at University of Oslo. Dr. Roettger specializes in the sound patterns of language. He has published important work on analytical methods, aimed at increasing the reliability of research in linguistics and cognitive psychology.

What happens if you give several researchers the same data set and ask them to answer the same research question?  Dr. Roettger's talk is about how analysts use wildly different approaches, sometimes arriving at categorically different conclusions. He will talk about how this can threaten the very fabric of scientific progress, and what we can do about it. 

Dr. Julia Uddén (Stockholm University) is a psychologist specializing in the underlying mechanisms of language. During recent years, Dr. Uddén has used behavioral and neuroimaging methods to investigate socio-pragmatic processing – with a focus on its development in adolescence, and its involvement in language use during conversation in adult populations. Dr. Uddén is currently leading a research project investigating the development of soio-pragmatic processing in  adolescents with ADHD.

In her talk, Julia will discuss the importance of the experimental context in fMRI studies on language. She will compare fMRI  findings that were based on interactive vs. non-interactive settings.