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On this site you can find information about the Social Minds Research Group. We hope you can find here the information you are looking for - in case you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

the Social Minds Research Group
About the group:


The Social Minds Research Group was founded in 2008 by researchers at the Institute of Psychology ELTE University Budapest with the goal to study the high-level cognition and learning processes; their (joint or separate) development and their connection, on the wide basis of social cognition.

We are particularly interested in fields such as the nature and ontogeny of autobiographical memory, understanding other's minds, the social embeddedness of conceptual thinking, and the role of peers in knowledge acquisition. 

The core concept in these topics is that how and to what level social environment contributes to the development and use of the above mentioned fields.


Our main accomplishments:

  • We where the first to prove that the natural pedagogy supports the acquisition of general, object-centered knowledge
  • In our research with György Gergely we showed that the nature of childhood imitation is selective, that is, they do not imitate everything but they follow only the new and relevant information, otherwise they choose the easier and more efficient way to achieve the goal 
  • Our experimental data supports the theory that the study of early memory performance with imitation experiments is really about general knowledge acquisition and retrieval - children do not retrieve one-time, particular memories, but the general knowledge and experience they gather from these memories



About our current projects you can find information under "Current Research", and about out members of our groups under "Staff".