Our Team

Rasha Abdel Rahman
Group Leader and Principal Investigator

After graduating from Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Rasha worked as a postdoc at the Max PIanck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen. She then re-joined her alma mater as a principal investigator. In 2009, she was awarded a Heisenberg professorship and subsequently became full professor of Neurocognitive Psychology at HU Berlin. She investigates the mechanisms underlying language, vision, social and semantic processing and the multifaceted interplay of these core human faculties.

mail: rasha.abdel.rahman@hu-berlin.de
google scholar: click here
ORCiD: click here

Katherine Fernández
Administration Management

Kathi is a multifaceted collaborator. She is a professional dancer and choreographer of contemporary dance, a Tai Chi teacher and also a wholesale and foreign trade sales woman. She is in charge of the administrative work of the group, such as the coordination of human resources issues, transactions and public and third party budgetary work as well as office and secretarial management. As a foreign language assistant (Spanish, English and German), Kathi also plays an important communication role between the Humboldt University, the different partners and the team members.

mail: katherine.fernandez@hu-berlin.de

Guido Kiecker
Lab Engineer

Guido is a true OG member of our lab. He specializes in all technical aspects that keep our EEG labs and offices running perfectly, task programming, positive vibes, and generally knowing stuff.
When you’re wondering how on earth to implement that new paradigm in the lab, he’ll help you just do it. Whatever difficulties arise, Guido reliably comes up with a creative solution fast. One of the first things new lab members do, is arrange a meeting with Guido and get a lab introduction. All this has earned him numerous acknowledgments and much praise in the lab’s publications and dissertations.

mail: guido.kiecker@hu-berlin.de

Alexander Enge
Doctoral Researcher

Alex is working on the interface between visual perception and semantic processing – how we learn to see meaning in previously unfamiliar shapes and objects. He is currently carrying out his doctoral studies in cooperation between HU Berlin and the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences. In his doctoral project, he investigates how learning to read changes children’s brain activity in response to spoken and written words. Alex also enjoys working on novel tools for analyzing complex neuroimaging (fMRI and EEG) data in a transparent and reproducible way.

mail: alexander.enge@hu-berlin.de
twitter: https://twitter.com/alexenge

Martin Maier
Postdoctoral Researcher

Martin investigates the ways in which meaning — embedded in language, knowledge, or emotions — shapes human perception and conscious experience. His current project explores the potential of knowledge augmentation in artificial networks, in collaboration with computer vision scientists at the Cluster Science of Intelligence. Martin first came to the lab as a student researcher and joined the Berlin School of Mind and Brain for his PhD studies. His award-winning dissertation revealed influences of language on fundamental aspects of perception.

mail: martin.maier@hu-berlin.de

Anna Eiserbeck
Doctoral Researcher

Anna’s research focuses on the access of visual information to conscious perception and the influences of social-emotional information on visual experience. She investigates these topics using the attentional blink paradigm and event-relates potentials, focusing on faces as a form of complex stimuli with high social significance and meaning. Within a project at the Cluster Science of Intelligence she furthermore works on investigating how humans (emotionally) process input from artificial agents versus humans.

mail: anna.eiserbeck@hu-berlin.de

Julia Baum
Postdoctoral Researcher

Julia investigates how emotional gossip and misinformation (“fake news”) affects our perception of people. She uses different methods like behavioural measures, electrophysiological correlates of brain activity (ERPs), eye tracking, and pupillometry to find out how we process social-emotional information and its trustworthiness, and what we can do to protect ourselves against misinformation biasing our perceptions and judgments. Julia joined the lab as a student researcher, did her doctoral studies with the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and has worked
with the Cluster Science of Intelligence on knowledge-augmented face perception in artificial intelligence.

mail: julia.baum@hu-berlin.de

Kirsten Stark
Doctoral Researcher

Kirsten studies the speech production of lying, i.e., what happens in our brain when we decide to speak/type a lie. To this end, she developed a paradigm to study lying in social browser-based settings and EEG. Kirsten initially joined the lab as an intern. After a research stay at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she studied the role of faces and bodies in emotion recognition, she joined us as a student assistant. During her PhD, she is a fellow of the Einstein Center for Neurosciences and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain.

mail: kirsten.stark@hu-berlin.de
twitter: https://twitter.com/kirstenfstark

Antje Lorenz
Postdoctoral Researcher

Antje’s research focuses on language production in adults with and without language impairment (aphasia). Currently, she is working in a DFG-funded project on social robotics and communication, which belongs to the Cluster Science of Intelligence. In her recent DFG-funded project she investigated the roles of healthy aging and language proficiency in compound production. In additional projects, she explored the representation of plural nouns in different languages. She is currently in the habilitation process at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (professional teaching qualification for Psychology).

mail: antje.lorenz@hu-berlin.de

Hannah Kaube
Doctoral Researcher

Hannah investigates the impact of affective knowledge on the perception of artworks and cultural artefacts. She is passionate about utilising (neuro)scientific methodology to try and add an empirical perspective to philosophical and/or theoretical discourse. She has been at the lab since her Master’s Thesis and is currently the recipient of a doctoral scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation (Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes).

mail: hannah.kaube@hu-berlin.de
twitter: https:// twitter.com/hannahkaube

Niels Lilienthal
Student Assistant

Niels is a student assistant at Science of Intelligence. There he was involved in the research project „Knowledge-augmented face perception“, which aims for bridging the gap between human and synthetic face perception and is now currently involved in the project „Electrophysiological Investigations of Social Intelligence“, to better understand its neural basis and consequently its usage to enhance the development of artificial intelligence. Niels is part of the Master’s program Cognitive Science – Embodied Cognition at the University of Potsdam. Beforehand he graduated a Bachelor in Psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin, where in his bachelor thesis he investigated how to mitigate the effects of emotional (mis)information on social judgements with AI-trustworthiness warnings on Twitter.

Felix Baier
Student Assistant

Felix is a bachelor´s student at Humboldt-University of Berlin. He got into neurocognitive Psychology to combine his love for the human and natural sciences. That´s why he joined Science of Intelligence as a student assistant to work on electrophysiological investigations of social intelligence.

mail: felixbaierdon@gmail.com

Laura Ackermann
Student Assistant

Laura is a Bachelor student of psychology at Humboldt University of Berlin. During her studies she took a great interest in General Psychology and hence decided to join the lab as a student assistant.

mail: laura.elisa.ackermann@student.hu-berlin.de

Tamiah Sivertsen
Student Assistant

Tamiah is a master’s student of psychology at Humboldt University and a student assistant in the lab. She initially joined the lab as an intern during her bachelor’s, where she was mainly involved in the research project on lying and truth-telling in a social context and completed her bachelor thesis on a variation including emotional stimuli. Apart from language production and comprehension, as well as social interaction, she is also generally interested in perception, how it is influenced by prior knowledge, and memory.

Alexander Leonhardt (Leo)
Doctoral Researcher

Leo comes from a multidisciplinary background. He has studied Philosophy and Cognitive (Neuro-)Science at the University of Sussex and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. In between, he has worked as a communication designer. These disciplines each influence his work, which investigates how people perceive robots and AI and deals with practical and ethical implications of what we understand about the social interface between humanity and technology.

mail: leonhaal@hu-berlin.de

Mahdieh S. Mirmohammad
Intern

Mahdieh has graduated as a psychologist and is currently a student in the Master program Mind and Brain at Humboldt University of Berlin. She comes from a clinical background and her research interest focuses on how cognitive and affective impairments influence the way human brain perceive, process, and interact with social cues.

A. Sueda Nisanci
Intern

Sueda received her bachelor’s degree in Psychology and Sociology. Currently, she is a master’s student in Mind and Brain at Humboldt University of Berlin and a DAAD-TEV scholar. She is involved in the “knowledge-augmented face perception” project as a student assistant. Her research interest is investigating the processing and underlying mechanisms of social-emotional information on human interaction and its influence on human behavior.

Sangjoon Woo
Intern

Sangjoon majored in biological science in Korea and now he is studying neuroscience at Humboldt University with a master’s degree in Mind and Brain. He participated in the EEG experiment related to language production of lying and helped prepare and proceed with the experiment.
Sangjoon is interested in human decision- making processes, neuroscientific mechanisms through EEG, fMRI, and especially data analysis.

Alumni and Collaborators

Anna Kuhlen

Anna Kuhlen’s research focuses on how cognitive processes are adapted to the social context in which they take place. In particular, Anna Kuhlen is interested in the cognitive and neural architecture that supports language production in social interaction; including how the processes involved in speaking are shaped by knowledge about the interaction partner. Anna Kuhlen worked from 2015 to 2022 as scientific staff member in research and teaching in our group. Since 2022 Anna Kuhlen holds a professorship for Biological Psychology and Social Psychology at RWTH University Aachen.

Romy Frömer

Romy Frömer completed her undergraduate, graduate, and postdoctoral training at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Working with Werner Sommer, her dissertation research examined mechanisms of cognitive control in the motor domain. After receiving her PhD, Romy performed postdoctoral research with Rasha Abdel Rahman, focusing on the role of predictions and uncertainty in perception. Her research also explores the intersection of metacognition (error monitoring and confidence) and feedback-based learning in the motor domain.

Website: click here

Adil Ishag
Postdoctoral Fellow

Adil is a postdoctoral fellow supported by Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. He is interested in Psycholinguistics, Bilingualism and Second Language Acquisition. His current research project investigates the cognitive processing of grammatical gender in Arabic – German bilinguals. Prior to joining the lab, Adil was a staff member at International University of Africa, in Sudan. 

mail: adil.ishag@hu-berlin.de

Milena Rabovsky

Milena Rabovsky did her PhD at the Berlin School of Mind and Brain (Germany). After research stays at the University of Western Ontario (Canada), Stanford University (USA) and Freie Universität Berlin (Germany), she started as principal investigator and tenure track professor at the University of Potsdam. Her research investigates how language processing works in the brain, using neuroscientific evidence and computational modelling.

Website: click here

Alissa Melinger

Alissa is a graduate of the Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York. Alissa held post-doctoral positions at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands and at Saarland University in Germany. In 2006, Alissa joined the School of Psychology at the University of Dundee where she is a Reader in Psychology. Alissa’s research combines linguistic theory, psychological models, and experimental methodology into a line of research that investigates what speakers know about words. Together with Rasha Abdel Rahman, Alissa developed a multiple word variant of picture-word interference paradigm to investigate the relationships between different types of distractor effects.

Website: click here

Olga Wudarczyk-Markett

Olga is the Professor of Psychology at the IU International University of Applied Sciences. Her research focuses on multimodal communication in human-robot interactions using behavioural and neurophysiological approaches. She holds a PhD from RWTH Aachen University, an MSc in Psychological Research from the University of Oxford, and an MA in Psychology from the University of Edinburgh.

Anne Vogt
Doctoral Researcher

Anne is very fascinated about the human capacity of language and speaking and she is particularly interested in whether the rich experiences we make in our everyday lives influence how we speak and which words we chose when speaking. With a strong background in embodied language processing Anne joined the lab and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain after studying linguistics and psychology in Tübingen. She now combines embodied cognition with language production research using classic paradigms like picture naming tasks as well as more unconstrained contexts to elicit speech. Furthermore, she is very active in moving language production experiments online to be able to test more diverse samples in the future.