Humans are an intensely social species. We frequently coordinate with other people to accomplish important tasks and our well-being depends on fulfilling social relationships. Yet social function is not trivial, and these outcomes ultimately hinge on how we communicate with each other. In this lab, our primary research goal is to investigate the psychological, neural, and behavioral processes that support successful communication in naturalistic, person-to-person contexts. Specifically, we focus our efforts in three main topics:
1. Cognitive Mechanisms of Social Communication
Social interactions involve a great deal of dynamic information and uncertainty. To manage this complexity successfully and efficiently, the human mind has developed various cognitive mechanisms optimized for our social demands. What are these mechanisms and how do they work in live interaction? How are they built/updated through experience and in what ways do they go awry in psychological disorders?
2. Emergent Dynamics of Group Coordination
The majority of social neuroscience and psychology research is done on individuals thinking about hypothetical social targets. This gives us information about what neural and psychological processes are involved in thinking about others, but there is still much to learn about how people think with others. When two or more people are in a live conversation, the success of this conversation may involve more than just the sum of the psychological parts. What are the emergent dynamics associated with two brains working in concert? What behaviors facilitate this mental coordination?
3. Beliefs and Motivations that Shape Communication
Beyond what happens within a social interaction, communication outcomes are also sensitive to the goals, motivations, and prior beliefs we bring with us. Do different affective and motivational states influence the way we deploy cognitive mechanisms of communication? How do our pre-existing beliefs about others shape the communicative behaviors we use?
4. Improving Methods in Naturalistic Social Research
This research program focuses on naturalistic social interaction - unconstrained, dynamic, multimodal, and interactive contexts of social function. Traditional research methods in social neuroscience and psychology are not well-suited to this type of paradigm. Thus, in addition to the above theoretical research interests, this lab also works on developing measurement and analytic methods more suited to naturalistic social interaction research. We aim to both publish the results of these efforts as well as build open code packages and educational resources for the wider research community to use.
