Biography

I am a cognitive scientist interested in the interplay between individual cognition and collective cultural dynamics. 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 downstream 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.

Theoretically, 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. Similarly, I employ a variety of methods: conceptual analysis, human behavioral studies and computational modeling.