Biography

I am a cognitive scientist exploring the dynamic interplay between individual cognition and collective phenomena. This interplay goes in two directions. On the one hand, I’d like to understand how individual cognitive capacities give rise to collective behavioral patterns, ranging from sensorimotor coordination in dyadic joint actions to emergence of unique human skills like language. On the other hand, I’m fascinated by the potential top-down effects of collective phenomena on individual behavior and cognition. For instance, the way culture allows us to “offload” our thinking onto the social and material structure, resulting in lower demands on cognitive complexity.

I approach these issues from the perspective of embodied and distributed cognition but I also draw theoretical inspiration from more standard frameworks in cognitive science such as active inference, iterated learning approach to cultural evolution, and domain-general theories of social cognition. My methods are diverse, encompassing conceptual analysis, human behavioral studies, and computational modeling.

Starting in 2024 I am advancing a new research agenda titled collective adaptivity, which is the capacity of groups to adjust to changing environments and task demands. Since this is only a capacity, it may not always be realized. The top-down effects may sometimes trap the agents in certain coordination patterns which are no longer suited for the new situation at hand. I aim to investigate this topic by 1) developing a theoretical framework for understanding the phenomenon of collective adaptivity grounded in enactivism, 2) implementing a series of agent-based simulations and human subject experiments to test the theory.