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Adults see vision to be more informative than it is
(2014)Quarterly Journal of Experimental PsychologyHumans gain a wide range of knowledge through interacting with the environment. Each aspect of our perceptual experiences offers a unique source of information about the world—colours are seen, sounds heard and textures felt. Understanding how perceptual input provides a basis for knowledge is thus central to understanding one's own and others’ epistemic states. Developmental research suggests that 5-year-olds have an immature understanding ...Journal Article -
The Influence of Facial Signals on the Automatic Imitation of Hand Actions
(2016)Frontiers in PsychologyImitation and facial signals are fundamental social cues that guide interactions with others, but little is known regarding the relationship between these behaviors. It is clear that during expression detection, we imitate observed expressions by engaging similar facial muscles. It is proposed that a cognitive system, which matches observed and performed actions, controls imitation and contributes to emotion understanding. However, there ...Journal Article -
A generalised semantic cognition account of aesthetic experience
(2022)NeuropsychologiaGiven that aesthetic experiences typically involve extracting meaning from environment, we believe that semantic cognition research has much to offer the field of neuroaesthetics. In the current paper, we propose a generalised framework that is inspired by the semantic cognition literature and that treats aesthetic experience as just one example of how meaning accumulates. According to our framework, aesthetic experiences are underpinned ...Journal Article -
Mind Meets Machine: Towards a Cognitive Science of Human–Machine Interactions
(2021)Trends in Cognitive SciencesAs robots advance from the pages and screens of science fiction into our homes, hospitals, and schools, they are poised to take on increasingly social roles. Consequently, the need to understand the mechanisms supporting human– machine interactions is becoming increasingly pressing. We introduce a frame- work for studying the cognitive and brain mechanisms that support human– machine interactions, leveraging advances made in cognitive ...Journal Article -
Linking person perception and person knowledge in the human brain
(2016)Social Cognitive and Affective NeuroscienceNeuroscience research has examined separately how we detect human agents on the basis of their face and body (person perception) and how we reason about their thoughts, traits or intentions (person knowledge). Neuroanatomically distinct networks have been associated with person perception and person knowledge, but it remains unknown how multiple features of a person (e.g. thin and kind) are linked to form a holistic identity representation. ...Journal Article -
The Control of Mimicry by Eye Contact Is Mediated by Medial Prefrontal Cortex
(2011)The Journal of NeuroscienceSpontaneous mimicry of other people's actions serves an important social function, enhancing affiliation and social interaction. This mimicry can be subtly modulated by different social contexts. We recently found behavioral evidence that direct eye gaze rapidly and specifically enhances mimicry of intransitive hand movements (Wang et al., 2011). Based on past findings linking medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) to both eye contact and the ...Journal Article -
Investigating the Relationship between Stable Personality Characteristics and Automatic Imitation
(2015)PLoS ONEAutomatic imitation is a cornerstone of nonverbal communication that fosters rapport between interaction partners. Recent research has suggested that stable dimensions of personality are antecedents to automatic imitation, but the empirical evidence linking imitation with per- sonality traits is restricted to a few studies with modest sample sizes. Additionally, atypical imi- tation has been documented in autism spectrum disorders and ...Journal Article -
The shaping of social perception by stimulus and knowledge cues to human animacy
(2016)Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological SciencesAlthough robots are becoming an ever-growing presence in society, we do not hold the same expectations for robots as we do for humans, nor do we treat them the same. As such, the ability to recognize cues to human animacy is fundamental for guiding social interactions. We review literature that demonstrates cortical networks associated with person perception, action observation and mentalizing are sensitive to human animacy information. ...Journal Article -
Anodal tDCS over Primary Motor Cortex Provides No Advantage to Learning Motor Sequences via Observation
(2018)Neural PlasticityWhen learning a new motor skill, we benefit from watching others. It has been suggested that observation of others’ actions can build a motor representation in the observer, and as such, physical and observational learning might share a similar neural basis. If physical and observational learning share a similar neural basis, then motor cortex stimulation during observational practice should similarly enhance learning by observation as ...Journal Article -
Exploring the relationship between anthropomorphism and Theory-of-Mind in brain and behaviour
(2021)Human Brain MappingThe process of understanding the minds of other people, such as their emotions and intentions, is mimicked when individuals try to understand an artificial mind. The assumption is that anthropomorphism, attributing human-like characteristics to non-human agents and objects, is an analogue to theory-of-mind, the ability to infer mental states of other people. Here, we test to what extent these two constructs formally overlap. Specifically, ...Journal Article