Dr. Helene Kreysa

Post-Doctoral Researcher

Phone: +49 (0)3641 945 980

Fax: +49 (0)3641 9 45182

Email: helene.kreysa [at] uni-jena.de

Address: Leutragraben 1, 18th floor, Room 18-N07

Curriculum Vitae

Education

  • Ph.D. in Psychology, 2009, University of Edinburgh, UK.
  • Magister Artium in Linguistics, Sociology and Psychology, 2005, Westf. Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.
  • Dipl.-Psych., 2004, Westf. Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.

Positions

  • 10/2012 – today: Post-doctoral researcher, Department of Psychology, Friedrich Schiller University of Jena, Germany.
  • 05/2009 – 10/2012: Post-doctoral researcher, Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Germany.
  • 09/2005 – 08/2009: Doctoral student in Psychology of Language, University of Edinburgh, UK.
  • 01/2001 – 08/2005: Research assistant, Institute for Psychology II, Westf. Wilhelms-Universität Münster, Germany.

Professional activities

  • Since 2018: Co-organiser of the journal club “Current Topics in Autism Research” (with Dr. D. Schneider)
  • Since 2012: Eyetracking lab manager
  • 2013-2016: stellvertretende Gleichstellungsbeauftragte und Vertreterin des akademischen Mittelbaus im Fakultätsrat der Fakultät für Sozial- und Verhaltenswissenschaften der Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena
  • 2010-2012: Member of the Scientific Board for the Cognitive Interaction Technology Center of Excellence (CITEC), Bielefeld University.

Academic teaching:

  • Most years, I teach the MSc courses “Language and Communication” in the summer semester and “Neuropsychological Assessment” (with PD Dr. P. Bublak) in the winter semester. I have also taught several “Empra”-courses at Bachelor level.
  • I regularly supervise Bachelors and Masters theses – please contact me if you are interested in the topics listed under “Main research interests” below.
  • Teaching certificates “Lehrqualifikation Advanced” (2018/19) and “Lehrqualifikation Basic”, Service-Stelle LehreLernen, FSU Jena zu Grundlagen der Hochschuldidaktik (Umfang: 120 Stunden, 4 ECTS)

Reviewing for scientific journals:

  • Brain & Cognition / Cognition / Cognitive Processing / Cognitive Psychology / Cognitive Science / Dialogue & Discourse / Froniers in Communication / Frontiers in Psychology / Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied / Journal of Memory and Language / International Journal of Human-Computer Studies / Language and Cognition / Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology / Perception / PlosOne / Psychological Research / Second Language Research

Membership in scientific societies:

  • BBS Associate; Bund Deutscher Psychologen; Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie; Gesellschaft für Bedrohte Sprachen; Voice Research Group (FSU Jena)

Main research interests

My primary scientific interest is the role of nonverbal cues for person perception and communicative interaction. These nonverbal cues can be transient (e.g. gaze direction, emotion) or ongoing (e.g., trustworthiness, age), and they can occur both in the face and in the voice. A very important aspect here is to investigate how facial and vocal cues are integrated, and the situations in which one form of information may prove more important than the other.

Proceeding roughly along a continuum from visual to linguistic, here are some other topics I have worked on and/or am interested in:

  • Pupillometry, or how the eye’s pupil can reflect psychological aspects of processing
  • ultra-rapid perception and the uptake of scene gist
  • spatial indexing during and after processing a visual stimulus
  • shared attention and joint intention: what are they, and what not?
  • anticipatory eye movements and prediction in language and during natural tasks
  • interactive alignment and the role of coordination in dialogue
  • reference resolution between interlocutors
  • the role of verbs and actions in sentence processing; what constitutes an event?
  • syntactic priming in comprehension and production
  • semantic classification and categorisation
  • bilingual language processing.

In addition to behavioural methods of experimental psychology I work primarily with eyetracking (SMI and EyeLink) and take a keen interest in recent methodological debates on how to analyse this data.

Publications

Papers in peer-reviewed journals:

Rodriguez Ronderos, C., Münster, K., Guerra, E., Kreysa, H., Rodríguez, A., Kröger, J., Kluth, T., Burigo, M., Abashidze, D., Nunnemann, E., & Knoeferle, P. (2018). Eye tracking during visually situated language comprehension: Flexibility and limitations in uncovering visual context effects. Journal of Visualized Experiments, 141, e57694. doi:10.3791/57694

Kreysa, H., Nunnemann, E. M., & Knoeferle, P. (2018). Distinct effects of different visual cues on sentence comprehension and later recall: The case of speaker gaze versus depicted actions. Acta Psychologica, 188, 220-229. doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2018.05.001

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2018). Look before you speak: Children’s integration of visual information into informative referring expressions. Journal of Child Language, 45(5), 1116-1143. doi:10.1017/S0305000918000120

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2017). Looking at a contrast object before speaking boosts referential informativity, but is not essential. Acta Psychologica, 178, 87-99. doi:10.1016/j.actpsy.2017.06.001

Volk, G. F., Granitzka, T., Kreysa, H., Klingner, C. M., & Guntinas-Lichius, O. (2017). Initial severity of motor and non-motor disabilities in patients with facial palsy: an assessment using patient reported outcome measures. European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Larnygology, 274, 45-52. doi:10.1007/s00405-016-4018-1

Kreysa, H., Kessler, L., & Schweinberger, S. R. S. (2016). Direct speaker gaze promotes trust in truth-ambiguous statements. PLoS ONE, 11(9), e0162291. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0162291

Abeln, J., Fresz, L., Amirshahi, S. A., McManus, I. C., Koch, M., Kreysa, H., & Redies, C. (2016). Preference for well-balanced saliency in details cropped from photographs. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 9, 704. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2015.00704

Meiser, V. C., Kreysa, H., Guntinas-Lichius, O., & Volk, G. F. (2016). Comparison of in-plane and out-of-plane needle insertion with vs. without needle guidance. European Archives of Oto-Rhino-Larnygology, 273, 2697-2705. doi:10.1007/s00405-015-3806-3

Volk, G. F., Granitzka, T., Kreysa, H., Klingner, C. M. and Guntinas-Lichius, O. (2016). Nonmotor disabilities in patients with facial palsy measured by patient-reported outcome measures. The Laryngoscope, 126, 1516-1523. doi:10.1002/lary.25695

Volk, G. F., Steigerwald, F., Vitek, P., Finkensieper, M., Kreysa, H., & Guntinas-Lichius, O. (2015). Facial Disability Index und Facial Clinimetric Evaluation Skala: Validierung der deutschen Versionen [Facial Disability Index and Facial Clinimetric Evaluation Scale: Validation of the
German versions]. Laryngo-Rhino-Otologie, 94, 163-68. doi:10.1055/s-0034-1381999

Kreysa, H. (2013). Preparing to be punched. Prediction may not always require inference of intentions [Commentary]. Behavioral & Brain Sciences, 35(4), 362-363. doi:10.1017/S0140525X12002622

Knoeferle, P., & Kreysa, H. (2012). Can speaker gaze modulate syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment during spoken sentence comprehension? Frontiers in Psychology, 3, 538. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00538

Edited book chapters:

Knoeferle, P., Kreysa, H., & Pickering, M. J. (2018). Effects of a speaker’s gaze on language comprehension and acquisition. In G. Brône & B. Oben (Eds.): Eye-tracking in Interaction. Studies on the Role of Eye Gaze in Dialogue (p. 47-66). Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins. https://doi.org/10.1075/ais.10.03kno

Kreysa H, & Pickering, M. J. (2011). Eye movements in dialogue. In S.P. Liversedge, I.D. Gilchrist, & S. Everling (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Eye Movements (p. 943-959). Oxford: OUP.

Dobel, C., Glanemann, R., Kreysa, H., Zwitserlood, P., & Eisenbeiss, S. (2011). Visual encoding of coherent and non-coherent scenes. In J. Bohnemeyer & E. Pedersen (Eds.), Event Representation in Language: Encoding Events at the Language-Cognition Interface (p. 189-215). Cambridge: CUP.

Peer-reviewed conference papers:

Nunnemann, E. M., Bergmann, K., Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2017). Referential gaze makes a difference in spoken language comprehension: Human speaker vs. virtual agent listener gaze. In: S. Ouni, C. Davis, A. Jesse, & J. Beskow (Eds.), Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Auditory-Visual Speech Processing (AVSP 2017). Stockholm, Sweden: KTH. http://avsp2017.loria.fr/proceedings/

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2016). Is children’s referential informativity associated with their visual or linguistic abilities? In: F. Salfner & U. Sauerland (Eds.), Pre-proceedings of Trends in Experimental Pragmatics (pp. 22-30). Berlin, Germany: XPRAG.de (Priority Program 1727).

Kreysa, H., Knoeferle, P., & Nunnemann, E.M. (2014). Effects of speaker gaze versus depicted actions on visual attention during sentence comprehension. In: P. Bello, M. Guarini, M. McShane, B. Scassellati (Eds.), Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2513-2518). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2013). Reference-related speaker gaze as a cue in online sentence processing. Kognitive Systeme 2013 (1): http://duepublico.uni-duisburg-essen.de/servlets/DocumentServlet?id=31355

Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2011). Effects of speaker gaze on spoken language comprehension: Task matters. In L. Carlson, C. Hoelscher, & T. Shipley (Eds.), Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (p. 1557-1562). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society.

Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2011). Peripheral speaker gaze facilitates spoken language comprehension: Syntactic structuring and thematic role assignment in German. In B. Kokinov, A. Karmiloff-Smith, & N.J. Nersessian (Eds.), European Perspectives on Cognitive Science: Proceedings of the European Conference on Cognitive Science 2011. Sofia, BU: New Bulgarian University Press

Recent conference presentations (selection):

Kreysa, H., Alkin, Y., Jahneke, M., Lorenz, E., Michal, P., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2020, cancelled due to corona pandemic). How does the voice affect the perception of a face? A comparison across age-groups. 62nd Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TeaP). Jena, Germany.

Kreysa, H., Scheffel, D., Altmann, C. S., Zäske, R., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2019, April). Multimodal effects of differentially attractive faces and voices on rating scores and pupil dilation. TeaP 2019. London, UK.

Nunnemann, E. M., Bergmann, K., Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2018, June). Referential gaze in spoken language comprehension: Human speaker vs. virtual agent listener gaze. Psycholinguistics in Flanders (PiF 2018), Gent, Belgium.

Dobel, C., Komes, J., Kreysa, H., Volk, G. F., Wiese, H., Guntinas-Lichius, O., Schweinberger, S. R. S. (2017, October). A new look at the facial feedback hypothesis: Encoding of faces in patients suffering from facial palsy. Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Vienna, Austria.

Davies, C. & Kreysa, H. (2017, July). Is children’s referential informativeness driven by their visual scanning behaviour? 14th International Congress for the Study of Child Language (IASCL), University Lyon 2, France.

Dobel, C., Komes, J., Kreysa, H., Volk, G. F., Wiese, H., Guntinas-Lichius, O., Schweinberger, S. R. S. (2016, April). Patients with chronic facial palsy display impairments in early encoding of faces: ERP evidence for the facial feedback hypothesis. Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society. NY, NY.

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2016, March). Do informative speakers always fixate a contrast object during speech planning? 3rd Workshop on The Attentive Listener in the Visual World (AttLis). University of Potsdam, Germany.

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2016, January). Is children’s referential informativity driven by their visual scanning behaviour? Trends in Experimental Pragmatics (TiXPrag) Workshop. Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS), Berlin, Germany.

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2015, June). Measuring Gricean processing: Eye movements as a reflection of speakers’ drive to be informative. MXPRAG Workshop on Formal and Experimental Pragmatics: Methodological Issues of a Nascent Liaison. Centre for General Linguistics (ZAS). Berlin, Germany.

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2015, April). Speakers are informative even when they fixate a contrast object briefly. Meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society (EPS), Leeds, UK.

Kreysa, H., Gründel, M., Schmidt, A.-M., Maisura Yusri, R., Schweinberger, S. R. (2015, March). Effects of gaze direction on perceived trustworthiness. TeaP 2015. Hildesheim, Germany.

Schweinberger, S.R., Kreysa, H., Blatz, L. & Rhodes, G. (2014, April). Pupillary responses to perceived facial attractiveness. TeaP 2014. Gießen, Germany.

Kreysa, H., Nunnemann, E. M., & Knoeferle, P. (2013). Comparing effects of speaker gaze and action information on anticipatory eye movements during spoken sentence comprehension. In: K. Holmqvist, F. Mulvey & R. Johansson (Eds.), Book of Abstracts of the 17th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM), 11-16 August 2013, Lund, Sweden. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 6(3), 150.

Poster Presentations (selection):

Festini, J. S., Fritsche, N., Kreysa, H., Dobel, C., Schweinberger, S. R., & Volk, G. F. (2020, cancelled due to Corona pandemic). Smiling helps! Effects of positive emotional expression on the perception of facial asymmetry. 62nd Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TeaP). Jena, Germany.

Glaser, M., Boltz, H.-S., Kreysa, H., & Schweinberger, S. R (2020, cancelled). Effects of an instructor’s eye gaze on cognitive performance in a question-answer interaction. TeaP 2020, Jena, Germany.

Sperl, L. F., Kaufmann, J. M., & Kreysa, H. (2020, cancelled). Several languages in the mind – On the architecture of the multilingual mental lexicon. TeaP 2020, Jena, Germany.

Nunnemann, E. M., Bergmann, K., Kreysa, H., & Knoeferle, P. (2018, September). Effects of referential gaze in spoken language comprehension: Human speaker gaze vs. virtual agent listener gaze. 24th Annual Conference on Architectures and Mechanisms of Language Processing (AMLaP), Berlin, Germany.

Kreysa, H., Altmann, C. S., Keller, F., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2017, October). Pupillary responses to facial attractiveness during the rating of likeability and leadership qualities. Annual Meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR), Vienna, Austria.

Kreysa, H., Altmann, C. S., Schneider, D., Zäske, R., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2017, August). Explicit and implicit judgements of voice attractiveness and trustworthiness: Two pupillometry Studies. Conference on Music & Eye-Tracking, Frankfurt, Germany.

Kreysa, H., Festini, J., Fritsche, N., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2015, October). Effects of positive emotional expression on the perception of facial asymmetry. Workshop XII of the DFG Research Unit “Person Perception”, Jena, Germany.

Davies, C. & Kreysa, H. (2015, July). Is children’s referential informativity associated with their visual or linguistic abilities? Poster presented at the Child Language Symposium, University of Warwick, England.

Kreysa, H., Gründel, M., Schmidt, A.-M., Yusri, R. M., & Schweinberger, S. R. (2015, April). Effects of gaze direction on perceived trustworthiness. Workshop XI of the DFG Research Unit “Person Perception”, Jena, Germany.

Davies, C., & Kreysa, H. (2015, March). Speakers can be informative even when they don’t fixate a contrast object immediately before speaking. 28th CUNY Conference on Human Sentence Processing. Los Angeles, USA.

Kreysa, H., Blatz, L., & Schweinberger, S.R. (2013). Pupillary responses to perceived gaze direction and facial attractiveness. In K. Holmqvist, F. Mulvey & R. Johansson (Eds.), Book of Abstracts of the 17th European Conference on Eye Movements (ECEM), 11-16 August 2013, Lund, Sweden. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 6(3), 563.

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