Welcome

The Bonn Social Neuroscience Unit studies the neural basis of social interactions between humans. Specifically, our interests range from the distinction between living and non-living things (perception of animacy), through aspects of social perception that include face perception, representations of actions, emotions, goals and intentions, to the decision whether to interact with social agents or not, and to social emotions occurring as a consequence of social decisions (see the figure with Stages 1 to 5 below). Recently we have looked at metacognition about some of these processes, and are exploring how competitive interactions influence decisions and strategies.

We use methods from classical visual psychophysics, behavioural economics and neuroimaging. While we are most interested in social cognition in healthy adult human participants, we collaborate in studies investigating variations of social cognition in psychological or psychiatric disorders, or in pharmacological models of such disorders.

Our main research topics are listed below, together with representative publications. How these topics relate to each other is described in the Research page. You can find out who we are here and find more publications here. Do contact us for more information or to participate in experiments.