I had a lot of fun last week organising @isgs2025.bsky.social in my role as chair of the local support team! Thanks to all attendees and organizers for making the conference such a great success 🫶

🧠 In an EEG experiment, we recorded brain activity while participants listened to the questions. Gestures led to signals of 𝙖𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙞𝙥𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 before the upcoming target word (i.e., alpha and beta power decreases), and 𝙚𝙖𝙨𝙞𝙚𝙧 𝙥𝙧𝙤𝙘𝙚𝙨𝙨𝙞𝙣𝙜 of the target word once it was heard (i.e., less negative N400) ✔️

In a behavioural experiment, people guessed the upcoming word (e.g., “type”) 𝙢𝙤𝙧𝙚 𝙖𝙘𝙘𝙪𝙧𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙡𝙮 after seeing a meaningful gesture vs. a meaningless control movement or vs. no hand movement ✔️

We asked: can listeners use gestures to 𝙥𝙧𝙚𝙙𝙞𝙘𝙩 what someone will say next? To find out, Dutch adults listened to a virtual avatar asking questions with 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘧𝘶𝘭 𝘨𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘶𝘳𝘦𝘴 (like miming typing) or 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨𝘭𝘦𝘴𝘴 𝘤𝘰𝘯𝘵𝘳𝘰𝘭 𝘮𝘰𝘷𝘦𝘮𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 (like rubbing the hand).

Hora est! 🎓 On Friday I successfully defended my PhD thesis "On how gestures facilitate prediction and fast responding during conversation", which can be found here (lnkd.in/eewcJYyt). It was an absolutely fantastic day! 😍