Arjen Stolk

Assistant Professor

Appointments

Assistant Professor

Mutual Understanding Laboratory

Biography

We might think that humans understand one another because they share the same set of communicative signals such as words, gestures, and facial expressions. However, that intuition neglects the extreme flexibility with which we employ our utterances in everyday social interaction. For instance, we can readily use the word "bank" to refer to money, a basketball shot, or a place to fish. Our conversational partner can usually grasp our intended meaning at its first occurrence, thanks to its context of use in an ongoing interaction. Humans thus seem to be endowed with a remarkable ability to rapidly find relevant context for selecting and interpreting communicative signals. My lab aims to understand what counts as context and how that context determines the meaning of an utterance. To this end, we combine controlled studies of live communicative interaction with state-of-the-art neuroimaging and electrophysiology (dual-fMRI, dual-EEG, intracranial EEG). The overarching goal is to characterize a fundamental and evolutionarily unique ability of our species, opening the way for understanding and treating disorders of human social interaction such as seen in Autism Spectrum Disorder.

Education

PhD, Donders Institute, The Netherlands

Postdoc, University of California, Berkeley

Publications

Koch SBJ, Tyborowska A, Niermann HCM, Cillessen AHN, Roelofs K, Bašnáková J, Toni I, Stolk A (2024). Integrating stereotypes and factual evidence in interpersonal communication. npj Science of Learning 9:52

Stolk A, Bašnáková J, Toni I (2022). Joint epistemic engineering: The neglected process in human communicationThe Routledge Handbook of Semiosis and the Brain

Wheatley T, Boncz A, Toni I, Stolk A (2019). Beyond the isolated brain: The promise and challenge of interacting minds. Neuron 103 (2), 186-188

Wadge H, Brewer R, Bird G, Toni I, Stolk A (2019). Communicative misalignment in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Cortex 115, 15-26

Stolk A, Verhagen L, Toni I (2016). Conceptual alignment: How brains achieve mutual understanding. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 20 (3), 180-191

Stolk A, D'Imperio D, di Pellegrino G, Toni I (2015). Altered communicative decisions following ventromedial prefrontal lesions. Current Biology 25 (11), 1469-1474

Stolk A, Noordzij ML, Verhagen L, Volman I, Schoffelen J-M, Oostenveld R, Hagoort P, Toni I (2014). Cerebral coherence between communicators marks the emergence of meaning. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (51), 18183-18188

Stolk A (2014). In sync: Metaphor, mechanism or marker of mutual understanding? Journal of Neuroscience 34 (16), 5397-5398

Stolk A, Noordzij ML, Volman I, Verhagen L, Overeem S, van Elswijk G, Bloem B, Hagoort P, Toni I (2014). Understanding communicative actions: A repetitive TMS study. Cortex 51, 25-34

Stolk A, Verhagen L, Schoffelen J-M, Oostenveld R, Blokpoel M, Hagoort P, van Rooij I, Toni I (2013). Neural mechanisms of communicative innovation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110 (36), 14574-14579

Stolk A, Hunnius S, Bekkering H, Toni I (2013). Early social experience predicts referential communicative adjustments in five-year-old children. PLoS One 8 (8), e72667

Contact

Arjen.Stolk@dartmouth.edu
+1 603 646 3446
Dartmouth College
HB 6207

Departments

Psychological and Brain Sciences

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