Titus von der Malsburg

I investigate how we make sense of language. How is each word that we hear or read combined with our understanding of the text so far? What sources of knowledge do we recruit in this process? And how are they combined, especially when they are in conflict? To answer questions like these, I use experimental and computational methods ranging from eye-tracking and event-related brain potentials to large-scale crowd-sourcing, corpus methods, Bayesian data analysis, computational cognitive modeling, and large language models.

I am a tenure-track professor at the Institute of Linguistics at the University of Stuttgart. Previously, I held postdoctoral positions at University of Potsdam, UC San Diego, and the University of Oxford. I earned my PhD in Cognitive Science at the University of Potsdam where I also served as a visiting professor for two years. In addition to my academic work, I have worked as a software engineer, founded two companies, and collaborated with sound artists and composers at the intersection of science and art.

Research interests: Incremental sentence comprehension; reading comprehension, reading strategies, and scanpaths; syntactic ambiguity and ambiguity resolution; implicit linguistic gender biases; cue-based parsing, working memory, interference; locality and word order; expectation, prediction, surprisal, and information density; cognitive biases and bounded rationality; resumptive pronouns; dog whistles, plausible deniability, and social meaning; experimental methods, especially web-based and eye-tracking; corpus methods and neural language models; Bayesian and frequentist statistics; computational cognitive modeling, large language models.

Teaching interests: Human sentence processing, eye-tracking, Bayesian data analysis, corpus methods, large language models, web-based experimental methods, scientific computing, foundations of math.

Media coverage:

• New York Times (25.01.2020): She’s the Next President. Wait, Did You Read That Right?
  
• WNYC Studios, The Takeaway: America's weekday conversation (podcast, 29.01.2020): Could "She" Be President? A Look at Pronoun Bias in Politics
  
• MIT News (08.01.2020): “She” goes missing from presidential language. Also reported by ScienceDaily, AAAS EurekaAlert!, and Phys.org.
  
• Kunstjahr 2013 – Die Zeitschrift, die Bilanz zieht, Lindinger + Schmid. Article about my science/art cross-over project with sound artist Christoph Illing.
  

My name is a bit unusual which may cause confusion. To clarify: My first name is “Titus” and my last name is “von der Malsburg”. Despite common misconceptions, my last name should not be written as “Von Der Malsburg”, just “Malsburg”, or “van der Malsburg” (with Dutch “van” instead of “von”). Nor should “von der” be treated as a middle name. For historical and practical reasons, it’s customary to list my name alphabetically under “M” not “v”. In BibTeX entries, it’s best to write {von der Malsburg}, Titus and to include the field sortname = {Malsburg} when I’m the first author of a publication.

My group currently includes Dr. Anna Prysłopska, who works on bracketing paradoxes and eye-tracking methodology, and Candy Adusei, who has just started her PhD project on relative clause attachment in Akan Twi.

Dr. Anna Prysłopska

Candy Adusei, M.A.

Together, we use a range of tools to conduct our research, including a TRACKPixx3 eye-tracker (2 kHz, binocular, similar to EyeLink 1000+) and three GazePoint trackers (two GP3 HD and one GP3). The latter are primarily used for eye-tracking education.

Better described as random technical notes, some of which are taken from our internal lab wiki.

• We use a plain GitHub repository for project and knowledge management (Feb 2025)
  
• How we do weekly updates (Feb 2024)
  
• A guide and template for self-hosted experiments (Nov 2023)
  
• Cohen’s d in simple linear regression models (Sept 2022)
  
• How to calculate worker compensation for Amazon Mechanical Turk (Dec 2016)
  
• Latin square designs in Ibex experiments (Feb 2016)
  
• Bayesian mixed-effects models using MCMCglmm (June 2015, horribly obsolete because we now have Stan-based packages such as brms, rstanarm, and rethinking)
  
• Predict vs simulate in lme4 (May 2015)
  

Science fundamentally relies on open source / libre software that prioritizes users’ needs over shareholders' interests. As such, we are committed to contributing to a robust software ecosystem developed and maintained by researchers for researchers.