Social Learning Lab

 

We learn about the world by drawing rich, abstract inductive inferences that go beyond what we can observe, and what we observe often originates from representations of the world that reside in other people’s minds. What we know the world is therefore heavily mediated by what others know about the world, and importantly, we also have the ability to affect what others know by sharing our own knowledge with them. In our everyday interactions with people around us, we seem to have an intuitive grasp of what kind of information to seek and to provide.

The Social Learning Lab (SLL) aims to understand the cognitive and the neural mechanisms that underlie the communicative interactions we experience in our everyday lives: between a teacher and a student, a caregiver and a child, or any provider of information and its recipient.     In particular, the ways in which young children learn from others provide a unique window to the interface between our ability to draw rational, inductive inferences and our ability to understand others’ thoughts and behaviors (Theory of Mind). Furthermore, our research interests extend to the representations and the inferential processes involved in reasoning about the costs, values, and utilities of informational transfer, a critically important ability for deciding when to learn from whom, about what.


Our projects will employ a wide range of methods (e.g., behavioral experiments, fMRI) with human subjects of all ages (from infants to adults). Using diverse approaches, we hope to make progress towards a full description of the cognitive and the neural mechanisms that allow these informative interactions to occur, both in the minds of the learners, and in the minds of the teachers.


The lab welcomes motivated, enthusiastic individuals who would like to join the journey. We currently do not have job openings, but please check back for more updates. In July 2014, we will migrate to a new website with more information about the lab and our new members!