I am a researcher at SFB TRR318 “Constructing Explainability”, a Collaborative Research Center at Paderborn and Bielefeld University. My doctoral research, supervised by Prof. Dr. Katharina J. Rohlfing with Prof. Dr.-Ing. Britta Wrede as co-PI in Project A05, investigated how verbal contrasts, especially negation, shape attention, memory, and action learning in human–human and human–robot interaction. The aim was to develop explanation methods informed by psycholinguistic research and grounded in human cognitive processes.

In general, my work lies at the interdisciplinary intersection of Cognitive Science and Psycholinguistics. This includes statistical modeling and (computational) cognitive science. Before joining SFB TRR318, I completed an M.Sc. in Cognitive Science and a Bachelor’s in Germanistik from JNU.

I am also interested in understanding the multimodal processes in both humans and artificial agents that support better explanations. To this end, I am currently working to bridge the methodological gaps between the disciplines, Psycholinguistics and Human-Robot Interaction, by bringing classical methods from psycholinguistics and cognitive science, such as online language processing and visual world paradigms, into HRI and XAI research.

Methodologically, I study human–human explanation using eye tracking and psycholinguistic experimentation.

For human–AI teaming, I work with foundation models, Human-Robot Interaction, and statistical modeling (mostly Bayesian).

Updates

🎉 PhD successfully defended 🎓

I successfully defended my doctoral dissertation, From Negation to Contrast and Context: A Framework for Contrastive Guidance of Actions in Interaction. Link

🎉 Paper accepted for IEEE ICDL 2026

Our paper A Divergence Model of Scaffolding in Dialogue via Negation has been accepted for presentation at the IEEE International Conference on Development and Learning (ICDL 2026). The study explores how people build shared understanding during conversation. Often in interaction, two people may begin to understand a task in slightly different ways. The paper shows that negation, for example, by clearly stating what something is not, can help make these differences visible and guide the conversation back in the right direction. Preprint

🎉 Paper accepted in Acta Psychologica

A recent paper analyzing eye-tracking data (preferential-looking paradigm) has been accepted for publication in Acta Psychologica. The study shows how individual differences in infants’ preference for salient object shapes influence word learning. Link

The open-access book on Social Explainable AI (sXAI) is now out. Read

I contributed a chapter on Explanation Goals. Link

TeaP 2026, Tübingen

I recently presented my work at TeaP 2026 in Tübingen. Read the abstract

IEEE ICDL 2025, Prague

At IEEE ICDL 2025 in Prague, I gave a talk on language-vision interaction in dialogical human-robot interaction. Watch the talk on YouTube

WinGaze

WinGaze: A tool for exploring multimodal interaction in HRI. View on GitHub