Research Experience

01 August 2020 – Ongoing - Post-Doctoral Researcher in University of Neuchâtel, Cognitive Science Centre.

01 October 2019 – 31 June 2020 - Post-Doctoral Researcher in Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Developmental Psychology Chair.

01 August 2018 – 30 September 2019 - DAAD Post-Doctoral Fellow in Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, Developmental Psychology Chair.

01 November 2015 – 20 June 2016 - Visiting Doctorate Researcher in University of Auckland - School of Psychology, Auckland, New Zealand.

2011- 2018 - Research and Teaching Assistant: Middle East Technical University, Graduate School of Informatics, Department of Cognitive Science, Ankara, Turkey.

Education

2013-2018 Ph.D. in Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

2010-2013 M.Sc. in Cognitive Science, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey.

2005 -2010 B.Sc. in Psychology, Uludağ University, Bursa, Turkey.

2007-2010 B.Sc. in Sociology (double major), Uludağ University, Bursa, Turkey.

Awards and Achievements

Thesis award - Best PhD thesis, 2018, by Middle East Technical University.

Research Grant - 2018-2019 DAAD Research Grants for Doctoral Candidates and Young Academics and Scientists

Scholarship - Graduate Scholarship by Council of Higher Education, Turkey, Faculty Development Program

Project Grant - Visiting Doctorate Researcher in University of Auckland - School of Psychology (Funded by The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey, 2015-2016)

Project Name - Joint tool making in 5-6 years of children: From cognitive to social factors

           Project Advisors - Prof. Dr. Michael Corballis, Dr. Annette Henderson

Summer School Participation and Grant - The Initiative for a Synthesis in Studies of Awareness Summer School, 22 May – 5 June 2017, Osaka, Japan

Conference Travel Grant - International Convention of Psychological Science (ICPS), 23 – 25 March 2017, Vienna, Austria

Spring School Participation and Grant - Spring School: Social Cognition, Emotion and Joint Action, 6 – 10 March 2017, Bochum, Germany

Summer School Participation and Grant - Amsterdam Brain and Cognition Summer School 2014: From genes to Cognition, Netherland: Amsterdam

Selected publications (please see the CV for the full list)

Gönül, G. & Paulus, M. (accepted). Children’s reasoning about the efficiency of others’ actions: The development of rational action prediction.

Gönül, G., Hohenberger, A., Corballis, M., & Henderson, A. (2019). Joint and individual tool making in preschoolers: from social to cognitive processes. Social Development, 28(4), 1037-1053.  https://doi.org/10.1111/sode.12373

Gönül, G., Takmaz, E., Hohenberger, A., & Corballis, M.  (2018). The cognitive ontogeny of tool making in Children: The role of inhibition and hierarchical structuring. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 173, 222-238. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jecp.2018.03.017

Gönül, G. & Zeyrek, D. (2014). Discourse connectives and lexical cohesion: An experimental investigation of sentence processing in Turkish.  Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 2281-2287). Quebec City, Canada: Cognitive Science Society. https://mindmodeling.org/cogsci2014/papers/397/paper397.pdf

Nijstad, B. A. (2018). Grup problem çözme ve grup yargı (G. Gönül, Translator). In Grup performansı (pp. 149-164, Trans. Eds. H. Coşkun & A. Y. Şenyurt). Ankara: Nobel Akademik Yayincilik. [Original work: Nijstad, B. A. (2009). Group problem-solving and group judgement. In Group Performance. East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press.]

Selected conference presentations

Gönül. G., (9-12 September 2019) Tool making, hierarchical representation, and imagination in preschool children. paEpsy 2019, University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany. [Symposium talk “Ontogeny of hierarchical cognition: variations and commonalities between domains” with Annette Hohenberger, Laura Maffongelli - Moritz Daum, Mauricio J. D. Martins, Saskia Tobias].

Gönül. G., Hohenberger, A., & Karabulut, A. (5-8 September 2019) To nap or to gap? The role of day sleep or task break on preschoolers’ insight into tool innovation.  27^th Conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP), Athens, Greece.

Gönül. G., & Hohenberger, A. (10-13 September 2018) Co-development of hierarchical structuring and tool making in children. 26^th Conference of the European Society for Philosophy and Psychology (ESPP), Rijeka, Croatia. [Symposium talk “Tool innovation, manufacture, and use in evolutionary, ontogenetic, and neurocognitive perspectives” with Alice Auersperg, François Osiurak and Sarah Beck].

Gönül, G., Hohenberger, A., Corballis, M. & Henderson, A. (4-5 January/2018). The ontogeny of tool innovation: Cognitive, social and cultural processes. Budapest Central European University Conference on Cognitive Development (BCCCD18), Budapest, Hungary

Selected Projects

Project researcher (ongoing project). MentalState (a side project of “NCCR Evolving Language: Exploring the past, present, and future of language”). Project Group: Fabrice Clement (PI), Klaus Zuberbühler (PI), Hans-Johann Glock (PI), Gökhan Gönül, Derry Taylor.

Project PI (ongoing project). Does mental simulation precede physical manipulation in tool innovation? (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, supported by DAAD scholarship; co-PI, Prof. Dr. Markus Paulus).

Project researcher (completed project). 2-Wege: Infants’ understanding of goal directed actions. Project Group: Gökhan Gönül, Markus Paulus, Marina Kammermeier.

Project researcher (completed project). The understanding of nested structures in the action and language domain: Underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Project Group: Gökhan Gönül, Markus Paulus, Saskia Tobias, Carolina Pletti,  Angela D. Friederici.

Project member (completed project). Insight or social learning? The effect of napping and task breaking on the innovative problem-solving ability of children (Middle East Technical University Scientific Investigation Project, 2700; Project Group: Gökhan Gönül, Assoc. Prof. Annette Hohenberger, Anıl Karabulut)

Project member (completed project): An experimental investigation of cognitive, language and social processes in tool making and tool innovation in children (Middle East Technical University Scientific Investigation Project, BAP-07-04-2015-001; Project Manager: Assoc. Prof. Annette Hohenberger)