Psychology

Profile

Starting out with studies in Linguistics and German, I turned to designing my own individual course of studies ”Mind, Brain, and Behaviour“ which I pursued in Vienna and Tübingen. I worked as a research assistant in Vienna, Krems, and Tübingen (MPI for Biological Cybernetics), and was a co-developer of the Middle European Interdisciplinary Cognitive Science (MEi:CogSci) Program in Vienna (EU Socrates), where I also occasionally teach .

Research interests:

• Spaces of meaning: different ways we generate and experience meaning through different ways of relating to and engaging with the world (whether with objects, with each other, or ourselves)
• How infants grow both within and also into culture, in particular the development of triadic infant-object-caregiver interactions
• Categorization, concept formation and symbol use as specific coordination activities
• How is “psyche”/”the mind” turned into an object of scientific investigation, and what are the consequences of different ways of approaching mind, brain, and behavior for encountering living beings in our everyday life?
• History and philosophical foundations of cognitive science, psychology and biology, especially in the first half of the 20th century and especially the work of Karl Bühler
• Practical applications: learning in formal and informal contexts, hands-on learning, experiential learning

PhD research:

My project explores how infants grow not only within but also into culture. It focuses especially on the development of triadic infant-object-caregiver-interactions:  how does jointly acting with or on objects and communicating about objects develop? How do infants and caregivers co-ordinate their joint actions and how do they form multimodal spaces of meaning within which they orient each other towards common points of reference? To explore these questions I look at infants during their first year of life as they encounter everyday objects and go through their everyday routines together with their caregivers.

Teaching

I have been teaching at the University of Vienna for several years:

2006-now Introduction to Cognitive Science 2: Approaching the Mind most of the time together with Andreas Reichelt

2010 New Trends in Cognitive Science: Concepts in Living and Artificial Systems, together with Michael Zillich

2008/2009 New Trends in Cognitive Science: The Social Turn in the Cognitive Sciences http://homepage.univie.ac.at/andreas.franz.reichelt/social/

together with Andreas Reichelt

2008 New Trends in Cognitive Science: Spatial Cognition http://homepage.univie.ac.at/andreas.franz.reichelt/space/ together with Andreas Reichelt

2007 Einführung in die Neurowissenschaften (Introduction to Neuroscience) [Gifted Education and Leadership, Danube University Krems]

together with Andreas Reichelt

2002-2005 teaching assistant for cognitive science seminars on learning, concepts, higher functions, of cognition and language with Markus Peschl at the Department for Philosophy of Science, University of Vienna.