Research Interests

I study how we make sense of other people's minds and their shared experiences.

Given our inability to share brains, we cannot directly access or perceive another's reality, which renders our experienced realities subjective and inherently "incomplete". With our subjective perspectives of the world and limited access to information causing uncertainty, how do we then adaptively interact with other individuals and collaborate with them to refine our mental models of the world? Verbal communication and other forms of interaction play essential roles in facilitating this collaboration, but what are the computational mechanisms underlying these processes? My research is guided by these questions, and in answering them I use a combination of real-time multiplayer web experiments, natural language processing (NLP) tools, and computational modeling (primarily Bayesian inference).