Cognition of Interaction
The complexity of human behaviour and cognition
has evolved from our need to interact, cooperate, and communicate in
complex social groups. The evolutionary processes that drive this
development affect humans as well as non-human primates.
The main
scientific goal of the CRC1528 Cognition of Interaction is to understand
how fundamental cognitive functions, like perception, selective
attention, action planning, and decision-making, contribute to social
interactions at the behavioural and neuronal level. We will investigate
these core cognitive functions and their neurobiological foundation
specifically in the context of dynamic interactions and decision-making
between two or more individuals. Across three research areas we address
the perception of faces and other social cues, prediction of visual
sensory information and selective attention to others’ actions; we
investigate the anticipation and representation of others’ intended
actions, partner choice and social learning and analyse the effect this
has on valuation, planning, and the resulting selection of actions. Our
aim is thus to achieve an integrative understanding of sensory,
inferential, and choice-related aspects of the Cognition of Interaction.The CRC1528 is carried by a transdisciplinary team of cognitive, systems, and computational neuroscientists, behavioral biologists and psychologists at the University of Göttingen, the German Primate Center, the University Medical Center Göttingen with the European Neuroscience Institute, the GWDG, the Max Planck Institute for Dynamics ans Self-Organiation, the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel.