{"id":37,"date":"2017-01-30T15:30:31","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T14:30:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/perso.unifr.ch\/pascal.gygax\/?page_id=37"},"modified":"2026-03-24T17:24:43","modified_gmt":"2026-03-24T16:24:43","slug":"my-profile","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/perso.unifr.ch\/pascal.gygax\/my-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"My profile"},"content":{"rendered":"

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. For all my work, I was awarded the Marcel Benoist Prize 2024<\/a>, the most prestigious scientific award in Switzerland, considered the Swiss Nobel Prize.<\/p>\n

Beside my work at the University of Fribourg (as a head\u00a0of the\u00a0Psycholinguistics and Applied Social Psychology<\/em> 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\u00a0has been very much impacted by social conventions.\u00a0With my colleagues\u00a0Sandrine Zufferey\u00a0From Bern University,\u00a0and Ute Gabriel, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, we have just published a public understanding of science book (\u00ab\u00a0Et si on arr\u00eatait de penser au masculin ?<\/a>\u00a0\u00bb [And why don’t we stop thinking in the masculine?] with Le Robert Editions.<\/p>\n

For a more personal description, you can read this portrait<\/a> (in French), published in the newspaper 24Heures on the 3rd of June 2021, \u00a0or watch this video (you can add english subtitles) :<\/p>\n