Christina Bergmann BITSS CatalystCognitive ScienceSSMART Grant Recipient
Christina is a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, Netherlands, where she moved in 2017 after completing a postdoc at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique in Paris, France. She obtained a Phd in 2014 from Radboud University Nijmegen.
Christina studies how early first language acquisition is shaped by infants’ environment and the capabilities and biases they bring to the task. She aims to always use the most suitable method and research design to gain further insights into the mystery of early development. At the same time, she advocates open science and transparent research practices.
Studying infants means working with a difficult-to-recruit-and-test population; after all, babies won’t simply follow instructions. This is also why Christina started to become interested in open science: After conducting her first meta-analysis during her PhD, she realized that infant research is both underpowered and might not use the most efficient methods. She has been studying task effects since her master thesis and has continued to investigate methods during her PhD using computational models.
To promote open science and improve current practices, Christina teamed up with an international group of researchers with similar interests and started the MetaLab project (funded by a SSMART grant), which promotes the use of meta-analyses and makes the underlying data and scripts all freely available. In addition, MetaLab provides ready-to-use visualization and calculation tools and educational materials aimed at lowering the (perceived and actual) hurdles to using meta-analytic methods. For more information, see the link below. She also joined the large-scale collaborative ManyBabies initiative (where she currently serves as member of the governing board). Next to these two concrete projects and the associated dissemination activities, Christina teaches classes and gives tutorials on statistics, data visualization, meta-analyses, preregistration and registered reports, and open science in general.