Out Of The Rabbit Hole
Cognitive scientist Nafees Hamid discusses research on the motivations of people approaching or already committed to violent extremism. The conversation examines sacred values, social relationships and how psychological research may help disengage people from extremist ideas. The supporting research includes behavioural and neuroimaging studies of willingness to fight and die for a cause. Hosted by Shankar Vedantam. Hidden Brain Media dates this public episode release to 10 September 2026 and provides audio, research references and a transcript. The publisher notes that transcripts can reflect an earlier episode version.
Postdoctoral Scientist - Schulze Lab
The Schulze Lab at HHMI Janelia seeks a postdoctoral scientist spanning systems neuroscience, computer vision, pose tracking, behavioral machine learning, and virtual reality. The researcher will build closed-loop paradigms and brain-behavior maps to study collective behavior, social cognition, individuality, sex differences, and stress in Danionella fish.
Great ape interaction: Ladyginian but not Gricean
Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying different modes of attention manipulation. The paper also argues that the attested tendencies of great ape interaction—for instance, to be dyadic rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than ‘displaced’—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I will reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not Gricean, and distinguish several varieties of meaning that are continuous with one another. We conclude that the evolutionary origins of linguistic meaning lie in gradual changes in not communication systems as such, but rather in social cognition, and specifically in what modes of attention manipulation are enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans, and only humans, ‘language ready’.
Social Curiosity
In this lecture, I would like to share with the broad audience the empirical results gathered and the theoretical advancements made in the framework of the Lendület project entitled ’The cognitive basis of human sociality’. The main objective of this project was to understand the mechanisms that enable the unique sociality of humans, from the angle of cognitive science. In my talk, I will focus on recent empirical evidence in the study of three fundamental social cognitive functions (social categorization, theory of mind and social learning; mainly from the empirical lenses of developmental psychology) in order to outline a theory that emphasizes the need to consider their interconnectedness. The proposal is that the ability to represent the social world along categories and the capacity to read others’ minds are used in an integrated way to efficiently assess the epistemic states of fellow humans by creating a shared representational space. The emergence of this shared representational space is both the result of and a prerequisite to efficient learning about the physical and social environment.
The role of top-down mechanisms in gaze perception
Humans, as a social species, have an increased ability to detect and perceive visual elements involved in social exchanges, such as faces and eyes. The gaze, in particular, conveys information crucial for social interactions and social cognition. Researchers have hypothesized that in order to engage in dynamic face-to-face communication in real time, our brains must quickly and automatically process the direction of another person's gaze. There is evidence that direct gaze improves face encoding and attention capture and that direct gaze is perceived and processed more quickly than averted gaze. These results are summarized as the "direct gaze effect". However, in the recent literature, there is evidence to suggest that the mode of visual information processing modulates the direct gaze effect. In this presentation, I argue that top-down processing, and specifically the relevance of eye features to the task, promotes the early preferential processing of direct versus indirect gaze. On the basis of several recent evidences, I propose that low task relevance of eye features will prevent differences in eye direction processing between gaze directions because its encoding will be superficial. Differential processing of direct and indirect gaze will only occur when the eyes are relevant to the task. To assess the implication of task relevance on the temporality of cognitive processing, we will measure event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to facial stimuli. In this project, instead of typical ERP markers such as P1, N170 or P300, we will measure lateralized ERPs (lERPS) such as lateralized N170 and N2pc, which are markers of early face encoding and attentional deployment respectively. I hypothesize that the relevance of the eye feature task is crucial in the direct gaze effect and propose to revisit previous studies, which had questioned the existence of the direct gaze effect. This claim will be illustrate with different past studies and recent preliminary data of my lab. Overall, I propose a systematic evaluation of the role of top-down processing in early direct gaze perception in order to understand the impact of context on gaze perception and, at a larger scope, on social cognition.
Learning from others, helping others learn: Cognitive foundations of distinctively human social learning
Learning does not occur in isolation. From parent-child interactions to formal classroom environments, humans explore, learn, and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts. Rather than simply observing and copying their conspecifics, humans engage in a range of epistemic practices that actively recruit those around them. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart? In this talk, I will present a series of studies that reveal the remarkably sophisticated inferential abilities that young children show not only in how they learn from others but also in how they help others learn. Children interact with others as learners and as teachers to learn and communicate about the world, about others, and even about the self. The results collectively paint a picture of human social learning that is far more than copying and imitation: It is active, bidirectional, and cooperative. I will end by discussing ongoing work that extends this picture beyond what we typically call “social learning”, with implications for building better machines that learn from and interact with humans.
The Social Brain: From Models to Mental Health
Given the complex and dynamic nature of our social relationships, the human brain needs to quickly learn and adapt to new social situations. The breakdown of any of these computations could lead to social deficits, as observed in many psychiatric disorders. In this talk, I will present our recent neurocomputational and intracranial work that attempts to model both 1) how humans dynamically adapt beliefs about other people and 2) how individuals can exert influence over social others through model-based forward thinking. Lastly, I will present our findings of how impaired social computations might manifest in different disorders such as addiction, delusion, and autism. Taken together, these findings reveal the dynamic and proactive nature of human interactions as well as the clinical significance of these high-order social processes.
Psychological mechanisms and functions of 5-HT and SSRIs in potential therapeutic change: Lessons from the serotonergic modulation of action selection, learning, affect, and social cognition
Uncertainty regarding which psychological mechanisms are fundamental in mediating SSRI treatment outcomes and wide-ranging variability in their efficacy has raised more questions than it has solved. Since subjective mood states are an abstract scientific construct, only available through self-report in humans, and likely involving input from multiple top-down and bottom-up signals, it has been difficult to model at what level SSRIs interact with this process. Converging translational evidence indicates a role for serotonin in modulating context-dependent parameters of action selection, affect, and social cognition; and concurrently supporting learning mechanisms, which promote adaptability and behavioural flexibility. We examine the theoretical basis, ecological validity, and interaction of these constructs and how they may or may not exert a clinical benefit. Specifically, we bridge crucial gaps between disparate lines of research, particularly findings from animal models and human clinical trials, which often seem to present irreconcilable differences. In determining how SSRIs exert their effects, our approach examines the endogenous functions of 5-HT neurons, how 5-HT manipulations affect behaviour in different contexts, and how their therapeutic effects may be exerted in humans – which may illuminate issues of translational models, hierarchical mechanisms, idiographic variables, and social cognition.
LAB COGNITION GOING WILD: Field experiments on vervet monkeys'
I will present field experiments on vervet monkeys testing physical and social cognition, with a focus on social learning. The understanding of the emergence of cultural behaviours in animals has advanced significantly with contributions from complementary approaches: natural observations and controlled field experiments. Experiments with wild vervet monkeys highlight that monkeys are selective about ‘who’ they learn from socially and that they will abandon personal foraging preferences in favour of group norms new to them. The reported findings highlight the feasibility to study cognition under field conditions.
Becoming Human: A Theory of Ontogeny
Humans are biologically adapted for cultural life in ways that other primates are not. Humans have unique motivations and cognitive skills for sharing emotions, experience, and collaborative actions (shared intentionality). These motivations and skills first emerge in human ontogeny at around one year of age, as infants begin to participate with other persons in various kinds of collaborative and joint attentional activities, including linguistic communication. Our nearest primate relatives understand important aspects of intentional action - especially in competitive situations - but they do not seem to have the motivations and cognitive skills necessary to engage in activities involving collaboration, shared intentionality, and, in general, things cultural.
A sense of time in human evolution
What psychological mechanisms do primates use to engage in self-control, and what is the ultimate function of these skills? I will argue that a suite of decision-making capacities, including choices about the timing of benefits, evolved in the context of foraging behaviors and vary with ecological complexity across species. Then, I will examine how these foraging capacities can be generalized to solve novel problems posing temporal costs that are important for humans, such as cooking food, and can therefore underpin evolutionary transitions in behavior. Finally, I will present work testing the hypothesis that a limited future time horizon constrains the expression of other complex abilities in nonhumans, explaining the emergence of human-unique forms of social cognition and behavior.
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see
People frequently interpret the same information differently, based on their prior beliefs and views. This may occur in everyday settings, as when two friends are watching the same movie, but also in more consequential circumstances, such as when people interpret the same news differently based on their political views. The role of subjective knowledge in altering how the brain processes narratives has been explored mainly in controlled settings. I will present two projects that examines neural mechanisms underlying narrative interpretation “in the wild” -- how responses differ between two groups of people who interpret the same narrative in two coherent, but opposing ways. In the first project we manipulated participant’s prior knowledge to make them interpret the narrative differently, and found that responses in high-order areas, including the default mode network, language areas and subsets of the mirror neuron system, tend to be similar among people who share the same interpretation, but different from people with an opposing interpretation. In contrast to the active manipulation of participants’ interpretation in the first study, in the second (ongoing) project we examine these processes in a more ecological setting. Taking advantage of people’s natural tendencies to interpret the world through their own (political) filters, we examine these mechanisms while measuring their brain response to political movie clips. These studies are intended to deepen our understanding of the differences in subjective construal processes, by mapping their underlying brain mechanisms.