Research
Adaptivity is a capacity to maintain yourself through change. A bacterium climbing a sugar gradient and a gazelle running away from a lion are exercising this capacity. They monitor the state of variables essential to their continued existence, scan their environment for opportunities and threats, and regulate their behavioral trajectories to approach the former and avoid the latter. This capacity is at the core of what it means to be an agent.
My current research agenda is to scale this understanding from individuals to groups by building a framework of collective adaptivity. This agenda unfolds through three interrelated tracks:
- Connecting enactivism to collective behavior research.
- Modeling collective adaptive behavior with reinforcement learning and active inference.
- Testing human groups in online behavioral experiments that involve collective outcomes and dynamic environments.
In my research, I draw on my personal experience of trauma and resilience. I believe that to recover from a major perturbation is not to return to what was. It is to establish a new mode of being. I want to know how institutional, technological, and cultural systems can constrain or enable positive transformations.