Max M Louwerse

• PhD
• Professor at Tilburg University

Team coordination breakdowns (TCBs) generally reflect episodes of ineffective team functioning, resulting in suboptimal team performance. Computational identification of TCBs enables us to examine the underlying characteristics of suboptimal performance and to potentially deliver real-time feedback to teams. Especially in time-critical crisis situa...

Making eye contact with our conversational partners is what is most common in multimodal communication. Yet, little is known about this behavior. Prior studies have reported different findings on what we look at in the narrator's face. Some studies show eye gaze is usually focused on our conversational partner's eyes, other studies have shown evide...

Immersive virtual reality offers a range of unique possibilities. One of these is the realistic exploration of virtual worlds using natural walking. This however becomes difficult when the size of the virtual world exceeds that of the available physical space. Redirected walking in virtual reality presents a novel solution to this problem by typica...

Anthropomorphic agents are generally evaluated more positively and trustworthy by human users than agents that are not humanlike. However, subtle mismatches in an agent’s appearance and behavior can lead to perceived uncanniness resulting in a disrupted trust during human-agent interaction. This study investigated the impact of an agent’s appearanc...

Background The integration of Text‐to‐Speech (TTS) and virtual reality (VR) technologies in K‐12 education is an emerging trend. However, little is known about how students perceive these technologies and whether these technologies effectively facilitate learning. Objectives This study aims to investigate the perception and effectiveness of TTS vo...

The Overview Effect is a complex experience reported by astronauts after viewing Earth from space. Numerous accounts suggest that it leads to increased interconnectedness to other human beings and environmental awareness, comparable to self-transcendence. It can cause fundamental changes in mental models of the world, improved well-being, and stron...

Quantifying workload is necessary for effective and personalized flight training of student pilots: their workload must not be too low (risk of boredom) nor too high (overload). Passive brain-computer interfaces (pBCIs) allow for measurement of an individual's workload from their brain activity, however, the performance of pBCIs remains sub-optimal...

Transformative experiences in an individual’s life have a lasting impact on identity, belief system, and values. At the core of these experiences is the complex emotion of awe that promotes learning, making it worthwhile to study from an educational point of view. Drawing studies may provide a useful measure of awe in children—one that is more intu...

Team coordination breakdowns (TCBs) generally reflect episodes of ineffective team functioning, resulting in suboptimal team performance. Computational identification of TCBs enables us to examine the underlying characteristics of suboptimal performance, and to potentially deliver real-time feedback to teams. Especially in time-critical crisis situ...

Most natural language models and tools are restricted to one language, typically English. For researchers in the behavioral sciences investigating languages other than English, and for those researchers who would like to make cross-linguistic comparisons, hardly any computational linguistic tools exist, particularly none for those researchers who l...

What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classi...

Introduction: There is a rising interest in using virtual reality (VR) applications in learning, yet different studies have reported different findings for their impact and effectiveness. The current paper addresses this heterogeneity in the results. Moreover, contrary to most studies, we use a VR application actually used in industry thereby addre...

This package contains a manifest and link to a datasets derived from experimental data from two studies. Both studies employed a mixed-methods approach with university participants using an industrial VR application for training in electrical maintenance tasks. The first dataset corresponds to a study that used an experimental design with 60 parti...

Background Two-dimensional (2D) medical visualization techniques are often insufficient for displaying complex, three-dimensional (3D) anatomical structures. Moreover, the visualization of medical data on a 2D screen during surgery is undesirable, because it requires a surgeon to continuously switch focus. This switching focus problem also results...

Research in young adults has demonstrated that neurophysiological measures are able to provide insight into learning processes. However, to date, it remains unclear whether neurophysiological changes during learning in older adults are comparable to those in younger adults. The current study addressed this issue by exploring age differences in chan...

The Uncanny Valley (UV) theory predicts that imperfectly human-like artificial agents elicit negative reactions in perceivers. While to date most studies investigating the UV have been behavioral, there is a growing number of neuroscientific studies that hold the potential of shedding light on the automatic processes related to the UV. The current...

Virtual reality (VR) offers a training environment that promotes increased learning and performance. However, to what extent VR flight simulations offer increased performance compared to less-immersive simulators is not clear, and neither are their underlying cognitive aspects. In a within-subject experiment, we compared fight performance and subje...

This paper systematically reviews 20 years of publications (N = 54) on aviation and neurophysiology. The main goal is to provide an account of neurophysiological changes associated with flight training with the aim of identifying neurometrics indicative of pilot's flight training level and task relevant mental states, as well as to capture the curr...

Virtual faces have been found to be rated less human-like and remembered worse than photographic images of humans. What it is in virtual faces that yields reduced memory has so far remained unclear. The current study investigated face memory in the context of virtual agent faces and human faces, real and manipulated, considering two factors of pred...

Technological advancements have recently enabled researchers to build increasingly human-like agents with many of these agents being used for educational purposes. Despite the reported successes of these agents, research findings offer a rather inconclusive picture to what extent agent design features contribute to an effective learning experience....

The ubiquitous inverse relationship between word frequency and word rank is commonly known as Zipf’s law. The theoretical underpinning of this law states that the inverse relationship yields decreased effort in both the speaker and hearer, the so-called principle of least effort. Most research has focused on showing an inverse relationship only for...

Immersive virtual environments hold unexplored potential to scaffold and stimulate learning in multiple ways for the purpose of increasing potential learning gains. Yet, the number of implementations in educational settings remains very limited. One reason for limited implementation of immersive virtual environment applications may be a lack of rec...

Immersive virtual reality is increasingly regarded as a viable means to support learning. Cave Automatic Virtual Environments (CAVEs) support immersive learning in groups of learners, and is of potential interest for educational institutions searching for novel ways to bolster learning in their students. In previous work we have shown that the use...

Parodi (2007) made the case that corpus linguistics ought to more consider the second most common language spoken in the world (Spanish), and better disseminate the research findings on the structure of that language in the lingua franca of the academic world (English). Moreover, Parodi argued that corpus linguists should use corpora that are heter...

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a promising technique for non-invasively assessing cortical brain activity during learning. This technique is safe, portable, and, compared to other imaging techniques, relatively robust to head motion, ocular and muscular artifacts and environmental noise. Moreover, the spatial resolution of fNIRS i...

The COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted the status quo in many areas of society, including education. At all educational levels, on-site lecturing had to switch instantaneously to an online mode of instruction. This transition was so straightforward, that the argument could be made for online education to become a permanent fixture, particularly if it...

Despite advancements in computer graphics and artificial intelligence, it remains unclear which aspects of intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) make them identifiable as human-like agents. In three experiments and a computational study, we investigated which specific facial features in static IVAs contribute to judging them human-like. In Experiment 1...

International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education How to make the learning of complex subjects engaging, motivating, and effective? The use of immersive virtual reality offers exciting, yet largely unexplored solutions to this problem. Taking neuroanatomy as an example of a visually and spatially complex subject, the present stud...

The overview effect is the commonly reported experience of astronauts viewing planet Earth from space and the subsequent reflection on and processing of this experience. The overview effect is associated with feelings of awe, self-transcendence, and a change of perspective and identity that manifest themselves in taking steps toward protecting the...

Although many scholars deem non-invasive measures of neurophysiology to have promise in assessing learning, these measures are currently not widely applied, neither in educational settings nor in training. How can non-invasive neurophysiology provide insight into learning and how should research on this topic move forward to ensure valid applicatio...

Although many scholars deem non-invasive measures of neurophysiology to have promise in assessing learning, these measures are currently not widely applied, neither in educational settings nor in training. How can non-invasive neurophysiology provide insight into learning and how should research on this topic move forward to ensure valid applicatio...

The Attentional Spatial Numerical Association of Response Codes (Att-SNARC) effect has shown that number perception induces shifts in spatial attention (Fischer et al., 2003; Dodd et al., 2008). However, many replications were attempted and they often failed. In the present study, we investigated whether the Att-SNARC effect can be found for number...

Many studies have demonstrated that by embracing technological developments the quality of education improves, with evidence coming from virtual reality, serious gaming, and intelligent tutoring systems. In addition, by taking advantage of sensing technologies and learning analytics it becomes possible to monitor individual and group learning perfo...

It is crucial that naturally-looking Embodied Conversational Agents (ECAs) display various verbal and non-verbal behaviors, including facial expressions. The generation of credible facial expressions has been approached by means of different methods, yet remains difficult because of the availability of naturalistic data. To infuse more variability...

The current study examined the effectiveness of respiratory biofeedback in lowering subjective and objective arousal after stress. Participants were presented with a meditation session in virtual reality while subjective and objective arousal were measured, the latter measured through ECG and EEG. Three conditions were used: (a) a respiratory biofe...

In a meta-analysis of 113 experiments we examined neurophysiological outcomes of learning, and the relationship between neurophysiological and behavioral outcomes of learning. Findings showed neurophysiology yielding large effect sizes, with the majority of studies examining electroencephalography and eye-related outcome measures. Effect sizes on n...

Immersive virtual reality (VR) offers important benefits over non-immersive displays, such as increased ecological validity and high experimental control. Studies in cognitive science using immersive VR are however still rather limited in number. The current paper illustrates the opportunities to apply VR in the cognitive sciences by using an immer...

High immersion in virtual reality is often hypothesized to improve learning and memory. This immersion benefit is frequently attributed to presence, the user’s feeling of being present inside the computer-generated environment. Obtaining learning gains due to high immersion may however be difficult, as is evidenced by the null results of multiple s...

Debates on meaning and cognition suggest that an embodied cognition account is exclusive of a symbolic cognition account. Decades of research in the cognitive sciences have, however, shown that these accounts are not at all mutually exclusive. Acknowledging cognition is both symbolic and embodied generates more relevant questions that propel, rathe...

Recent research has suggested that language processing activates perceptual simulations. We have demonstrated that findings that have been attributed to an embodied cognition account can also be explained by language statistics, because language encodes perceptual information. We investigated whether comprehension of emotion words can be explained...

The authors investigate the potential of Mixed Reality (MR) games for team building and assessment. The AMELIO game was designed for a highly immersive MR lab. The game is a multi-player team challenge based on the concept of an escape room, staged in a space colony emergency situation. An explorative empirical pre-post measurement study was carrie...

Knowledge regarding social information is commonly believed to be derived from sources such as formal relationships and interviews and can be plotted as complex networks. We explored whether social networks can also be extracted through other means by using language statistics. In three computational studies we computed first-order and higher-order...

We tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tracking the time course of the Conceptual Modality Switch effect. Forty-six participants verified the relation between property words and concept words. The conceptual modality of consecutive trials was manipulated in order to produce an Auditory-to-visual switch condition, a Haptic-t...

Recent studies of naturalistic face‐to‐face communication have demonstrated coordination patterns such as the temporal matching of verbal and non‐verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non‐verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between verbal an...

This OSF acrhive contains all data from the experiment, including: CogSci conference paper, poster, stimuli norming, experiment set-up, behavioural pretest, main behavioural and electrophysiological data, and extensive R code for descriptives, plots, and statistical analysis.AbstractWe tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tr...

Recent studies of naturalistic face-to-face communication have demonstrated temporal coordination patterns such as the synchronization of verbal and non-verbal behavior, which provides evidence for the proposal that verbal and non-verbal communicative control derives from one system. In this study, we argue that the observed relationship between ve...

We tested whether conceptual processing is modality-specific by tracking the time course of the Conceptual Modality Switch effect. Forty-six participants verified the relation between property words and concept words. The conceptual modality of consecutive trials was manipulated in order to produce an Auditory-to-visual switch condition, a Haptic-t...

One of the key challenges in the rapid technological advance of Virtual Reality (VR) and Mixed Reality (MR) concerns the design of collaborative experiences. VR systems do not readily support team collaboration because they tend to focus on individual experiences and do not easily facilitate naturalistic collaboration. MR environments provide solut...

It is assumed linguistic symbols must be grounded in perceptual information to attain meaning, because the sound of a word in a language has an arbitrary relation with its referent. This paper demonstrates that a strong arbitrariness claim should be reconsidered. In a computational study, we showed that one phonological feature (nasals in the begin...

Semantic roles play an important role in extracting knowledge from text. Current unsupervised approaches utilize features from grammar structures, to induce semantic roles. The dependence on these grammars, however, makes it difficult to adapt to noisy and new languages. In this paper we develop a data-driven approach to identifying semantic roles,...

Computational techniques comparing co-occurrences of city names in texts allow the relative longitudes and latitudes of cities to be estimated algorithmically. However, these techniques have not been applied to estimate the provenance of artifacts with unknown origins. Here, we estimate the geographic origin of artifacts from the Indus Valley Civil...

Silent reading fluency has received limited attention in the school-based literatures across the past decade. We fill this gap by examining both oral and silent reading fluency and their relation to overall abilities in reading comprehension in fourth-grade students. Lower-level reading skills (word reading, rapid automatic naming) and vocabulary w...

The cognitive science literature increasingly demonstrates that perceptual representations are activated during conceptual processing. Such findings suggest that the debate on whether conceptual processing is predominantly symbolic or perceptual has been resolved. However, studies too frequently provide evidence for perceptual simulations without a...

Checking the truth value of political statements is difficult. Fact checking computationally has therefore not been very successful. An alternative to checking the truth value of a statement is to not consider the facts that are stated, but the way the statement is expressed. Using linguistic features from seven computational linguistic algorithms,...

Abstract Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are...

Past research on grammar induction has found promising results in predicting parts-of-speech from n-grams using a fixed vocabulary and a fixed context. In this study, we investigated grammar induction whereby we varied vocabulary size and context size. Results indicated that as context increased for a fixed vocabulary, overall accuracy initially in...

The relationship between language and thought has received a great deal of attention in linguistics. An increasing amount of empirical literature now suggests that our native language can affect how we think about the world around us. The present study asked two groups of participants to read the same story and to judge the attribution of the respo...

The diversity of ways in which toponyms are specified often results in mismatches between queries and the place names contained in gazetteers. Search terms that include unofficial variants of official place names, unanticipated transliterations, and typos are frequently similar but not identical to the place names contained in the gazetteer. String...

The spatial-numerical association of response codes (SNARC) has shown that parity judgments with participants' left hands yield faster response times (RTs) for smaller numbers than for larger numbers, with the opposite result for right-hand responses. These findings have been explained by participants perceptually simulating magnitude on a mental n...

Research in cognitive linguistics has emphasized the role of embodiment in metaphor comprehension, with experimental research showing activation of perceptual simulations when processing metaphors. Recent research in conceptual processing has demonstrated that findings attributed to embodied cognition can be explained through language statistics. T...

There is increasing evidence from response time experiments that language statistics and perceptual simulations both play a role in conceptual processing. In an EEG experiment we compared neural activity in cortical regions commonly associated with linguistic processing and visual perceptual processing to determine to what extent symbolic and embod...

Spatial mental representations can be derived from linguistic and non-linguistic sources of information. This study tested whether these representations could be formed from statistical linguistic frequencies of city names, and to what extent participants differed in their performance when they estimated spatial locations from language or maps. In...

A variety of theoretical frameworks predict the resemblance of behaviors between two people engaged in communication, in the form of coordination, mimicry, or alignment. However, little is known about the time course of the behavior matching, even though there is evidence that dyads synchronize oscillatory motions (e.g., postural sway). This study...

Assessing silent reading fluency in classroom environments is challenging. This article reports on a method of assessing silent reading using underlining, an approach that solves many problems other silent reading fluency assessment measures face. This method computationally monitors readers' silent reading fluency by the speed they underline words...

An eye tracking study investigated the effects of local and global discourse context on the processing of subject and object relative clauses, whereby the contexts favored either a subject relative clause interpretation or an object relative clause interpretation. The fixation data replicated previous studies showing that object relative clause sen...

Knowledge regarding social information is thought to be derived from many different sources, such as interviews and formal relationships. Social networks can likewise be generated from such external information. Recent work has demonstrated that statistical linguistic data can explain findings thought to be explained by external factors alone, such...

The Chinese Room argument describes a thought experiment that suggests that for symbols to become meaningful, they must be grounded in perceptual experiences. Embodied cognition theorists frequently use this argument to claim that cognition requires perceptual simulation. We shed light on the symbol grounding problem by arguing that the structure o...

Previous studies have demonstrated that comprehension of conceptual metaphors elicits embodied representations. This finding is non-trivial, but begets the question whether alternative explanations are to be dismissed. The current paper shows how a statistical linguistic approach of word co-occurrences can also reliably predict metaphor comprehensi...

Recent literature in the cognitive sciences has demonstrated that cognition is fundamentally embodied. For instance, various studies have shown that semantic knowledge about the human body correlates with spatial body representations, suggesting that such knowledge is embodied in nature. An alternative explanation for this finding comes from the Sy...

This chapter argues that language comprehension is both embodied and symbolic. It notes that according to the symbol interdependency hypothesis comprehenders can ultimately ground symbols, but they also can rely on interdepndencies across symbols as a shortcut to the meaning of words. It provides an overview of the evidence supporting this hypothes...

We present an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system for recording chart notes during patient encounters, enhanced by the use of various feedback mechanisms like progress bars and alerts. The extensive use of various feedback mechanisms, which are not present in existing EHRs, leads to improved quality of chart notes. Our experiments show that alert...

The field of medical informatics has been thriving over the last decade. One critical task in medical informatics is whether computational algorithms allow for predicting diseases from symptoms and vice versa. A niche of algorithms that has not been explored extensively are computational linguistic in nature and focus on higher-order co-occurrences...

Researchers have identified a leader’s speeches during times of crisis as a key component in leadership ability and style. In the present research, we used two computational linguistic tools, Coh-Metrix and LIWC, to explore the changes in linguistic complexity, social dimensions, and emotions of speeches that Fidel Castro delivered before and after...