Hi, I am Wim Pouw. I am a cognitive scientist at Tilburg University (Cog Sci & AI department) studying different aspects of movement and communication. My overall research program is about understanding how communication systems are forged through mult-scale interactions that become coordinated (e.g., functionally aligned) in a way that allows for more novel, stable, adaptable, or more evolvable communication to emerge. Ultimately, I empirically and theoretically investigate the pre-theoretical intuition that to understand how humans produce meaningful utterances we must ground it in more domain-general multi-scale processes that are shared with other animals. My expertise lies in quantitative approaches of body movement analysis (e.g., motion tracking methodology, time series analysis) with tracking of other communicative means such as vocalizations and speech. I combine a wide range of theoretical (radical embodied cognitive science, dynamical systems, evolutionary biology) and methodological (e.g., data science, movement science, bioacoustics, computer vision, phonetics) interests in my research so as to come to a computationally reproducible and theoretically grounded understanding of the topics me and my colleagues study.

At the VU University Amsterdam, I obtained my Bachelor degree in Psychology in 2009, Master degree (research master) in Social Psychology in 2011, and a second master degree in Theoretical Psychology in 2012. After my studies I enrolled as a PhD student at the Erasmus University Rotterdam (EUR) under supervision of Profs. T. Van Gog, R. Zwaan, F. Paas (I defended my thesis on the topic of learning and embodied & embedded cognition on 16th of March, 2017).

In 2017, the Netherlands Organisation of Scientific Research (NWO) awarded me a Rubicon grant for a 2-years research applying human movement analyses multimodal communication, under supervision of Prof. James Dixon at the University of Connecticut. In 2019 I was awarded a 'Donders Fellowship' at University of Nijmegen (Donders Institute) to work under supervision of Prof. Asli Ozyurek on the large-scale study of multimodal language. In November 2020 NWO awarded me a personal career grant (VENI), allowing me to continue my research for another 4 years on biophysical aspects of multimodal language (enddate in 2026). In 2022 Aleksandra Cwiek, Susanne Fuchs, and me, received a 'VICOM' grant from the German Research Council to perform research on the topic of biosemiotics with PhD candidate Šárka Kadavá. Currently I am employed as an Associate Professor at the Tilburg University at the Department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence, where I work under the research program Dynamic Signs and Signals (DYNAMOS²). I currently also have a second affiliation at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour as an Associate Principal Investigator.

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