I am an experimental psycholinguist and cognitive psychologist interested in the way we go beyond text and/or discourse to form mental representations. I have been particularly interested in the way background knowledge and explicit elements interact to form what we actually retain from reading or discourse. Although I mainly work on gender, emotion and health-related inferences, I have also been very much interested in the way we conceptualise the future.
Beside my work at the University of Fribourg (as a head of the Psycholinguistics and Applied Social Psychology Group, with Pascal Wagner-Egger), I am also involved in different forms of communication for the public understanding of science. I regularly speak on radio, give workshops on gender-fair language, and explain to children in schools how their perception of gender has been very much impacted by social conventions. With my colleagues Sandrine Zufferey From Bern University, and Ute Gabriel, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, we have just published a public understanding of science book (“Le cerveau pense-t-il au masculin?” [Does the brain think in the masculine?] with Le Robert Editions.
For a more personal description, you can read this portrait (in French), published in the newspaper 24Heures on the 3rd of June 2021.