Dr. Pratik Bhandari – Pratik Bhandari

Current research

I study how the brain/mind processes sound, speech, and language in typical and atypical populations.
Focusing on underrepresented, non-WEIRD, diverse communities, I aim to expand the scope of cognitive science in resource-constrained settings in Nepal.

Predictive processing

We continuously anticipate what our interlocutor is going to say next. When someone says, “Don’t go out in the rain, else you will get ___,” we predict that the last word will most likely be “wet.” (अचानोमा राखेर कसाइले मासु “काट्छ”।)
What are the mechanisms involved in making such predictions?

Listening in adverse conditions

Despite noise in the background, we make sense of what the other person is saying. How effortful are such sense-making processes? What are the cognitive resources involved? How do predictions help here?

Cognition in typical and atypical populations

More broadly, how does understanding the differences in these cognitive processes across typical and atypical populations help us better understand human cognition?

Trajectory of my research and education

I am a Research Scientist at the Nepal Center for Cognition and Society (NCCS). My work involves cross-cultural cognition research in low-resource settings in Nepal. I serve as an Adjunct Faculty member at the National Academy of Medical Sciences, Bir Hospital in Kathmandu.

Before returning to Nepal, I received my PhD from Saarland University, Germany (2022/23), working with Vera Demberg and Jutta Kray on the interaction of top-down and bottom-up processes in spoken language comprehension. Previously, I did my Masters in Cognitive Neuroscience of Language at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language (BCBL), Spain (2018), where I studied metacognition and bilingual language processing under David Soto’s supervision.
Prior to that, I got my undergraduate degree (Bachelors in Audiology and Speech-Language Pathology) from the Institute of Medicine (IOM), Tribhuvan University (2015) in Nepal, and worked in Ramesh Kumar Mishra’s lab at the University of Hyderabad in India (2017).