research interests.
motivating questions
We only ever have direct access to our own thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Yet in the middle of interacting and talking with someone else, we infer, moment by moment, what they think, feel, and care about from what they say and do. Sometimes we come to feel genuinely connected as a result. What cognitive process turns those inferences into felt connection? And why do others lead to disconnect instead?
the dissertation
My dissertation develops an inferential account of social connection, a framework for how people read another's inner world from what a real-time interaction actually provides. That includes a single stance on a topic, a partner's reaction to a shared moment as it unfolds, or the depth and rarity of a disclosed experience. I combine custom multi-user web paradigms with computational modeling (primarily Bayesian inference) and NLP to study these inferences during social interactions. Across three studies, I have shown connection emerges not from the quantity of commonalities but from the inferences people draw on top of them.
what's next
As a postdoc, I aim to build on my dissertation work by developing computational models of interacting minds. Most models of social cognition only consider one mind at a time, with an observer reasoning about a passive target. In real interaction, two minds update on each other in the same loop, and that interdependence changes the computation. I plan to build multi-agent models of coordination, capturing how each partner's inferences and actions shape the other's, and to test them with simulation experiments and behavioral data from custom multi-user paradigms. I will start with joint planning as a natural first problem space, before extending to richer social settings. Longer term, I want to use these models to ask why these processes break down in many psychiatric conditions. My goal is to formalize a mechanistic theory of how coordination between minds gives rise to, or fails to give rise to, the feeling of being truly understood by another.