Distinguished Lectures in Humanities

Virtual reality (VR) provides an immersive and interactive setting for language learning, allowing learners to practise various aspects of language in context-rich, naturalistic environments. Unlike traditional book-based methods, VR-based language training is expected to engage a broader network of brain regions by integrating sensory, motor, and cognitive processes. This raises important questions in the field of experience-dependent brain plasticity—specifically, whether immersive learning leads to more widespread or qualitatively different neural changes compared to more focal learning approaches. The talk will open with an overview of short- and long-term brain plasticity, setting the stage for understanding how the brain adapts during language learning. It will then present key findings from research on virtual reality-based language training, highlighting its potential to enhance learning through immersive experiences. Finally, the talk will share preliminary results from ongoing studies on single-session Mandarin learning in VR, along with the recent development of an interactive language puzzle game aimed at exploring cognitive engagement and neural activation in virtual environments.

Event date: 12/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. Johan MÅRTENSSON
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

No individual looms larger in historical accounts of 19th century China than Imperial Commissioner LIN Zexu. Yet, his legacy remains mixed. Most historical accounts characterize LIN’s attempt to end the illicit opium trade as ill-conceived, conservative, and ultimately resulting in his ignominious exile to a remote corner of the empire. In this talk, Prof. ATWILL focuses on LIN’s post-Opium War career to upend traditional accounts of the Opium War and to allow us to see with new eyes how Qing China faced global challenges in a rapidly changing world.

Event date: 29/9/2025
Speaker: Prof. David G. ATWILL
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

In the last two decades the contribution of neuroscience to bilingualism, in terms of discovering the neural architecture, has been enormous. Up-to-date we know how bi- and multilinguals store their languages, how and where they are represented in the human brain and how bilinguals control their languages in order to avoid unwanted language interferences during speech. Old myths that distinct languages are differently stored in the brain have been completed confuted. Neuroscientific studies have also highlighted neural differences between bilinguals and monolinguals for several cognitive functions, even for those circumstances where no behavioral differences exist. Neuroimaging studies have further shown different neural aging trajectories for bilinguals when compared to monolinguals underlining that the bilingual brain may be better protected against aging effects and cognitive decline.

During my presentation, I will provide a brief overview of the state of the art and then illustrate and discuss new research lines such as studying the foreign language effect, the effects of sleep and bilingualism on general cognition, the effects of linguistic distance on the bilingual brain and the importance of study the bilingual connectome. Lastly, we will discuss how to focus on individual differences in bilingualism research and heritage language speakers.

Event date: 8/10/2025
Speaker: Prof. Jubin ABUTALEBI
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

This presentation examines processes of subjectification whereby Chinese gods affirm unique personas and engage humans and each other in intersubjective interactions. In so doing, it develops relational approaches to study divine-human sociability. The vast array of ritual techniques developed over the longue durée in China to allow the gods to “talk back” to humans and create bonds have allowed these gods to affirm themselves as persons and subjects – even though there was also resistance against such developments. This lecture will propose an overview of the ritual techniques available for such personification and subjectification processes and their historical development in the Chinese world. It will then explore some of the theoretical and comparative dimensions of such processes and their consequences for our understanding of subjectivity.

Event date: 10/06/2025
Speaker: Prof. Vincent GOOSSAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Until recently, there were two main ways of obtaining information about words and expressions. The first was to analyze large text data sets (corpora) and calculate the frequency with which words and phrases occur, as well as the typical contexts in which they occur. The second was to ask participants to provide subjective information about words and phrases, such as the familiarity of the stimuli or the age at which they are typically acquired. The development of large language models has given us a third option. Instead of asking participants for information, we can query large language models. The results show that the information obtained from those models is just as good and often even better than the information obtained from people, especially when the model is tuned to a few thousand stimuli.

Event date: 30/05/2025
Speaker: Prof. Marc BRYSBAERT
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities

Human brain stores tremendous amount of knowledge about this world, which is the foundation of object recognition, language, thought, and reasoning. What’s the neural codes of semantic knowledge representation? Is the knowledge “roses are red” simply the memory trace of perceiving the color of roses, stored in the brain circuits within color-sensitive neural systems? What about knowledge that is not directly perceived by senses, such as “freedom” or “rationality”? I will present a set of studies from my lab that addresses this issue, including object color (and other visual) knowledge in several populations (congenitally blind humans, color blind humans, and typically developed macaques), and semantic neural representation in individuals with early language experience deprivation. The findings point to the existence of two different types of knowledge coding in different regions of the human brain – one conservative, based on sensory experiences, and one based on language-derived machinery that support fully nonsensory information. The relationship between these two types of knowledge coding will be discussed.

Event date: 09/04/2025
Speaker: Professor Yanchao BI (Peking University)
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities