Sayantan Mandal

I am a Cognitive Neuroscientist and Evolutionary Psychologist, currently serving as a faculty member at the Department of Psychology at KREA University. Here I teach evolutionary psychology, psycholinguistics and cognitive neuroscience, with a focus on the biological underpinnings of natural language. My theoretical specialization is in Generative Grammar and Evolutionary Psychology, while most of my empirical work involves spatial (fMRI) and temporal (EEG) neuroimaging and computational neuroscientific tools. I am particularly interested in working with undergraduate and graduate students willing to explore Natural Language at the interface of rationalist epistemology, cognitive neuroscience and computational theory of mind.

I completed my doctoral research at the Concordia Center for Cognitive Science and Linguistics. During this time I also held the position of MITACS Globalink Researcher at CNRS’s (France) Bases, Corpus et Langage (BCL) Laboratory and Complexité et Cognition (CoCo) Laboratory in Université Côte-d’Azur in Nice, France. Most of my empirical research work was carried out under the banners of CNRS’ BCL and CoCo Laboratories, and the School of Health (formerly, PERFORM Centre) in Concordia. I was supervised by Prof. Tobias Scheer and Prof. Charles Reiss.

I study the human faculty of language from the perspectives of biolinguistics, computational theory of mind and cognitive neuroscience. Specifically, I explore the nature of phonological representations and computations, their modular architecture in the mind and their interaction with the sensori-motor systems involved in speech.

Currently, my research follows two distinct but related lines of inquiry. My primary research at the moment is the Mind 2 Brain project, initiated by Prof. Tobias Scheer (CNRS), Dr. Alexander Marx Chabot (University of Maryland), and seeks to isolate the neurophysiological signatures uniquely associated with phonological computations (as opposed to memory suppletion, morpho-syntactic computations etc.) using electro-encephalography (EEG). The project is carried out in collaboration with Prof. Arild Hestvik at the Department of Neuroscience in Delaware University.

A related strand of research, Ghost in the Cell, carried out at Concordia’s School of Health, seeks to employ functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the possibility that phonological primes (distinctive features) might be instantiated by functionally specialised neural maps in the auditory cortex.

I hold two masters’ degrees in Theoretical Linguistics from The University of Auckland (New Zealand) and E.F.L. University (Hyderabad, India) respectively. Before embarking on my current research I was a post-graduate researcher in psycholingustics at the MARCS Institute of Brain, Behavior and Development, in Sydney, Australia. Here I worked with Prof. Catherine T. Best (primary supervisor), Prof. Anne Cutler, and Prof. Jason Shaw (Yale University), and received training in experimental psycholinguistic methodology. The work here was focussed primarily on bilingual phonology in adult early/simultaneous Malayalam-Australian English bilinguals. The work done here has directly contributed to most of my research skills, and provides the foundation on which I currently build my work.

Besides Cognitive Neuroscience and Linguistics, I am deeply interested in Free and Open Source Software (FOSS). All my research and publication work is conducted exclusively using FOSS software, and from time to time I contribute to various GNU/Linux projects.

I am an avowed anarcho-syndicalist, with an interest in political economics, and maintain active membership of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) and Salon Du Livre Anarchiste (Montreal).