Dr. Titus von der Malsburg
Department of Brain and Cognitive Science, MIT
- The New York Times reports about our research on linguistic gender biases. Also the NYT’s newsletter In Her Words on women, gender and society. There is also a WNYC Studios podcast with Jessica Bennett talking about our work. This MIT News article has a more detailed summary of our findings (see also ScienceDaily, AAAS EurekaAlert!, and Phys.org). The research itself is published in Psychological Science (open access journal PDF).
- Diane Mézière, who I co-supervise, will give a talk at SSSR 2020: Mézière, D., Yu, L., Reichle, E., von der Malsburg, T., & McArthur, G. (2020). A comparison of three reading comprehension tests using eye movements.
- New preprint: Stone, K., von der Malsburg, T., & Vasishth, S. (2020). The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies. https://osf.io/xrm43/
Contact
Profiles:
Twitter
ORCID
Open Science Framework
Github
Address:
Department of Linguistics
Campus Golm, House 14, room 2.36
Karl-Liebknecht-Straße 24-25
14476 Potsdam
Bio
I investigate how the human brain makes sense of language. How is each word that we hear or read combined with our understanding of the sentence so far? What sources of knowledge are recruited for this? And how are they reconciled 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 crowdsourcing and Bayesian statistical modeling.
I am a research assistant in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Potsdam and also affiliated with MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Science. Before, I replaced Shravan Vasishth for two years as the head of the Experimental and Computational Psycholinguistics Lab in Potsdam. Previously, I spent two years at UC San Diego in Keith Rayner’s and Roger Levy’s labs. I also did a short postdoc with Kate Nation at University of Oxford. I obtained my Ph.D. in Cognitive Science at the University of Potsdam under the supervision of Shravan Vasishth and Reinhold Kliegl. My undergraduate degree is in Computational Linguistics from the University of Tübingen. I also worked as a software developer, helped to found two companies (software and film production), and collaborate with sound artists and composers in Berlin.
Media coverage:
- In Her Words, New York Times newsletter on women, gender and society (4.2.2020): Surprise! Language is sexist.
- New York Times (25.1.2020): She’s the Next President. Wait, Did You Read That Right?
- WNYC Studios, The Takeaway: America's weekday conversation (podcast, 29.1.2020): Could "She" Be President? A Look at Pronoun Bias in Politics
- MIT News (8.1.2020): “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.
Publications
Click the button below to download an up-to-date BibTeX file containing all my publications. This file can be imported with common bibliography managers such as Zotero, Jabref, Mendeley, etc.
Manuscripts under review
Journal articles
Conference articles
Seit langem wird debattiert, wie reguläre und irreguläre Vergangenheitsformen repräsentiert und verarbeitet werden (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Pinker & Prince, 1988). Das Dual- Mechanism-Modell (DMM; Pinker & Prince, 1988; Clahsen, 1999) nimmt an, dass reguläre und irreguläre Formen von zwei verschiedenen Mechanismen verarbeitet werden. Vertreter des Single-Mechanism Ansatzes gehen alternativ von einem einzigen Mechanismus aus, der sowohl der Verarbeitung von regulären als auch irregulären Verben dient.
Conference talks
Boyce, V., von der Malsburg, T., Poppels, T., and Levy, R. (2019).
Remember ‘him’, forget ‘her’: Gender bias in the
comprehension of pronominal referents.
In Colunga, E., Kim, A., Michaelis, L., and Narasimhan, B., editors,
Proceedings of the 32th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Boulder, CO, USA. University of Colorado Boulder.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Recent studies (Dimigen et al., JEP:G, 2011; Kretzschmar et al., NeuroReport, 2009) demonstrated the feasibility of investigating fixation-related potentials (FRPs) and that the results are similar to brain potentials recorded during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). We conducted an experiment to assess if this correspondence also holds for rhythmic brain activity. To pit our results against ults gained with RSVP, the experiment used sentences that are known to produce reliable effects both in the time domain and in the frequency domain (Hagoort, Science, 2004). Participants (N=48) read freely through true ('The Thames flows through London') and false statements ('The Hudson flows through London'). Hagoort et al. report an N400, a negative-going deflection in the ERP with a peak around 400 ms, as well as increased theta (4-7 Hz) and gamma (30-70 Hz) activity. During our experiment, participants' eye movements were monitored and their EEG was recorded from 32 electrodes and later evaluated contingent to the first fixation on the critical word. We analyzed the canonical eye-tracking measures with linear mixed-effects models and the EEG with cluster-permutation tests (Maris & Oostenveld, J Neurosci Methods, 2007) to control for multiple comparisons. As expected, we observed a negativity in the FRP with a centro-parietal distribution and a peak latency of approximately 400 ms. Also as expected, this N400 lined up with increased first fixation durations, gaze durations, and regression rates in the eye movement record (Dambacher & Kliegl, Brain Res, 2007). Crucially, fixation-related power spectra showed synchronization in the delta range (1-3 Hz) at central electrodes and desynchronization in the upper alpha range (11-13 Hz) at occipito-parietal sites relative to a pre-fixation baseline. None of these effects is reported by Hagoort et al. which suggests that fixation-related EEG changes are at least not fully comparable to those observed in RSVP. One reason for the diverging results could lie in different processing demands: In RSVP, readers must retrieve earlier parts of the sentence from working memory because they cannot make regressions. Increased theta activity reflects this more effortful memory access (Klimesch, Brain Res Rev, 1999). In natural reading, readers can easily move their eyes back to resolve the processing difficulty which facilitates memory access. Our findings question the comparability of results acquired with serial presentation vs. natural reading.
Recent research (Dimigen et al., JEP:G, 2011; Kretzschmar et al., NeuroReport, 2009) shows that fixation-related potentials (FRPs) yield similar results as brain potentials recorded during rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP). We conducted an experiment to see if this correspondence also holds for oscillatory brain dynamics. Participants (N=48) read true ("The Thames flows through London") and false factual statements ("The Hudson flows through London"). Such violations are known to elicit an N400, a negative-going deflection with a peak around 400 ms, and increased theta and gamma activity (Hagoort, Science, 2004). As expected, we see an N400 in the FRP and increased fixation durations and regression rates in the eye movement record. Moreover, a cluster-permutation test (Maris & Oostenveld, J Neurosci Methods, 2007) for fixation-related power spectra shows synchronization in the delta range (1-3 Hz) and desynchronization in the upper alpha range (11-13 Hz) but no theta or gamma effects. This is at odds with prior findings and suggests that fixation-related oscillatory EEG changes are not fully comparable to those observed in RSVP. One reason for the diverging results may lie in different processing demands: In RSVP, readers must retrieve earlier parts of the sentence from memory because they cannot make regressions.
Pioneering work in reading research has shown that scanpaths in reading can be informative about sentences processing (Frazier, Rayner, 1982). Nevertheless, scanpaths have not gained much traction in reading research. One reason for that may have been a lack of suitable analytical tools. Here, we summarize three recent studies in which we used a new scanpath measure to analyze gaze data from two experimental studies (von der Malsburg, Vasishth, 2011, 2012) and one corpus study (von der Malsburg, Kliegl, Vasishth, under revision). The experiments investigated how readers process temporarily ambiguous sentences. We showed that readers do not always commit to one of the alternative interpretations, and that readers with low working-memory capacity do so less often. Contrary to what was reported earlier, we found that reparsing instead of targeted repair is a common strategy to recover from incorrect interpretations. Interestingly, these results did not emerge in an analysis using traditional word-based eyetracking measures showing their limitations. In the corpus study, we demonstrated how syntax, oculomotor constraints, and age of reader jointly determine the regularity of scanpaths. We argue that, taken together, these results establish the scanpath as an informative and tractable object of investigation in reading research.
von der Malsburg, T., Vasishth, S., and Kliegl, R. (2012).
Scanpaths in reading are informative about sentence processing.
In Michael Carl, P. B. and Choudhary, K. K., editors,
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Eye-tracking and Natural Language
Processing, pages 37-53, Mumbai, India. The COLING 2012 organizing
committee.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Conference posters
Boyce, V., von der Malsburg, T., Poppels, T., and Levy, R. (2019).
Female gender is consistently under-expressed in pronoun production
and under-inferred in comprehension.
In Pancheva, R. and Iskarous, K., editors, 93th Annual Meeting
of the Linguistics Society of America, New York, NY, USA. Linguistic Society
of America.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Language production and comprehension draw on wide-ranging knowledge and beliefs, including general world knowledge and contextually variable information. Pronominal references to role nouns with diverse gender biases provide a window into the interplay of these sources of information: violations of stereotypical gender elicit surprise (e.g., referring to a surgeon as she), but comprehenders can accommodate to non-stereotypical genders within discourse. In two experiments, we investigate how gender expectations are reflected in production and comprehension of pronominal references to role nouns. Our results indicate that female gender is consistently underused in English pronoun production, and under-inferred in English pronoun comprehension.
Stone, K., Vasishth, S., and von der Malsburg, T. (2019).
ERP evidence for long-distance lexical predictions in German
particle verb constructions.
In Colunga, E., Kim, A., Michaelis, L., and Narasimhan, B., editors,
Proceedings of the 32th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Boulder, CO, USA. University of Colorado Boulder.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Schäfer, R., Lago, S., and von der Malsburg, T. (2019).
ERP evidence of object agreement attraction in comprehension.
In Colunga, E., Kim, A., Michaelis, L., and Narasimhan, B., editors,
Proceedings of the 32th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Boulder, CO, USA. University of Colorado Boulder.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
von der Malsburg, T., Poppels, T., Boyce, V., and Levy, R. (2018).
Gender-biases in language processing: Explicit beliefs about event
outcomes vs. implicit linguistic expectations.
In Knoeferle, P., editor, Proceedings of the 24th Architectures
and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.
Humboldt Universität Berlin.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Schäfer, R., von der Malsburg, T., and Lago, S. (2018).
Agreement attraction in german SOV structures: An ERP study.
In Knoeferle, P., editor, Proceedings of the 24th Architectures
and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.
Humboldt Universität Berlin.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Morgan, A., von der Malsburg, T., Ferreira, V., and Wittenberg, E. (2018a).
English resumptive pronouns do not help the comprehender.
In Knoeferle, P., editor, Proceedings of the 24th Architectures
and Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.
Humboldt Universität Berlin.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Morgan, A., von der Malsburg, T., Ferreira, V., and Wittenberg, E. (2016).
Resumptive pronouns hinder sentence comprehension in english.
In Carreiras, M., Mancini, S., Molinaro, N., Davidson, D., Caffarra,
S., and Martin, C., editors, Proceedings of the 22th Architectures and
Mechanisms for Language Processing Conference (AMLaP), page 98, Bilbao,
Spain. Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
von der Malsburg, T. and Angele, B. (2015).
False-positive rates in eyetracking studies with multiple dependent
measures.
In Kaiser, E., Mintz, T., Pancheva, R., and Zevin, J., editors,
Proceedings of the 28th Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence
Processing, Los Angeles, CA, USA. University of Southern California.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Standard analyses of eye movements in reading test a set of canonical dependent measures calculated for multiple regions. Although the resulting multiple comparisons increase the rate of false positive results, it is accepted standard practice not to correct for that. We investigated false positives rates through computer simulations and tested how much statistical power has to be sacrificed to control them. In 100.000 iterations, we generated six realistic data sets of eye movements for a hypothetical experiment with typical parameters. The true effect sizes of the manipulation ranged from 0 ms to 40 ms. Four standard measures were analyzed using linear mixed models: first fixation duration, gaze duration, go-past time, and total viewing time. In the data sets with no true effect, the rate of false positives was 12.1%, i.e. much higher than the conventionally accepted 5%. A Bonferroni correction reduced false positives to 3.2% and was therefore slightly more conservative than required. The reduction in power due to the Bonferroni correction was moderate, e.g., from 90% to 75% for effect sizes of 5 ms. Contrary to conventional wisdom, the Bonferroni correction seems to be an appropriate tool for controlling false positives in reading experiments.
Seit langem wird debattiert, wie reguläre und irreguläre Vergangenheitsformen repräsentiert und verarbeitet werden (Rumelhart & McClelland, 1986; Pinker & Prince, 1988). Das Dual- Mechanism-Modell (DMM; Pinker & Prince, 1988; Clahsen, 1999) nimmt an, dass reguläre und irreguläre Formen von zwei verschiedenen Mechanismen verarbeitet werden. Vertreter des Single-Mechanism Ansatzes gehen alternativ von einem einzigen Mechanismus aus, der sowohl der Verarbeitung von regulären als auch irregulären Verben dient.
Recent research demonstrated the feasibility of analyzing fixation-related brain potentials (FRPs) recorded during natural reading (Kretzschmar et al., 2009; Dimigen et al., 2011). Two questions arise from these studies: (1) Are effects observed with fixation-triggered EEG signals comparable to those observed in standard RSVP designs? (2) Does the combined analysis of EEG and fixation data provide additional insights into reading and comprehension processes that are not available with either method alone? Both above-mentioned studies used material known to robustly elicit strong N400 effects. The present study (N=50) examined responses to a more subtle manipulation representative of common experimental designs: we manipulated the distance between anaphoric expressions (pronouns, verb ellipsis) and their antecedents. Differences were examined using a non-parametric Monte Carlo test (Maris & Oostenveld, 2007). Increased distance of the antecedent elicited an early frontocentral negativity in response to verb ellipses (88ms-134ms, p<0.001) and a negativity at frontocentral and parietal electrodes on the words following pronouns (98ms-186ms, p<0.001). We discuss these results in the context of earlier findings and argue that adopting FRP-methodology requires factoring in complex visuomotor contingencies that are not yet fully understood and that evoke ERP effects different from those seen in RSVP designs.
von der Malsburg, T. and Vasishth, S. (2009a).
Analyzing spatio-temporal patterns in eye movements: A method and
software.
In Traxler, M. and Swaab, T., editors, Proceedings of the 22th
Annual CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing, Davis, CA, USA.
Univeristy of California, Davis.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
von der Malsburg, T. and Vasishth, S. (2008).
A new method for analyzing eye movements in reading that is sensitive
to spatial and temporal patterns in sequences of fixations.
In Gordon, P., editor, Proceedings of the 21th Annual CUNY
Conference on Human Sentence Processing, page 118, Chapel Hill, NC, USA.
Univerity of North Caroline at Chapel Hill.
[ bib |
.pdf ]
Exhibitions and performances
See this video about a sound installation I created together with sound artist Christoph Illing.
During reading, we rapidly construct meaning from sequences of rather cryptic symbols. A multitude of processes are involved in making meaning happen, however, most of them are conveniently tucked away from the reader’s conscious experience allowing them to read effortlessly without having to worry about any of the practicalities such as where to place the gaze next and for how long. The present work reflects on the marvelous feat that is reading. In an experiment-like situation, we create a perceptual short-circuit that unlocks the otherwise unconcsious processes involved in reading. To this end, the test subject is exposed to a written libretto while a computer tracks their eye movements and translates them to sound in real time. The artistic implementation is based on parametric synthesis (“mapping”) and model-based sonification.
Technical notes
Software
- Scasim
- An R package that implements our measure for scanpath similarity along with some tools for data prerocessing and visualization of scanpaths. The measure is described in von der Malsburg & Vasishth (JML, 2011).
- Saccades
- An R package for detecting saccades and fixations in raw eyetracking data. Implements the velocity-based algorithm proposed by Engbert & Kliegl (Vis Res, 2003).
- edfR
- An R package for reading EDF files generated by EyeLink eye-trackers.
- helm-bibtex
- A bibliography manager for Emacs.
- TEDview
- A program for visualizing discrete temporal data, e.g., events taking place in an incremental dialogue system. See von der Malsburg, Baumann, Schlangen (2009) for details.
- py-span-task
- A program for testing reading or operation span. Implements the recommendations given by Conway, Kane, Bunting, Hambrick, Wilhelm, & Engle (Psych Bull & Rev, 2005).


