Social and Cognitive Interactions Lab
ABOUT THE LAB
The Social and Cognitive Interactions Lab (PI: Eva Wiese) at George Mason University examines how humans interact with other humans, as well as nonhuman agents, such as animals, robots or avatars. In particular, we examine the behavioral and neural bases of human-human and human-nonhuman interactions and try to understand how interacting with humans differs from interacting with nonhuman entities - socially and cognitively. Insights from this research are used to inform the design of artificial agents and embodied products. For all research topics, we use behavioral and neurophysiological methods, such as eye tracking, EEG, fMRI and brain stimulation.
We examine causes and effects of mind perception in interaction with artificial agents and robots. The goal is to understand which physical and behavioral features nonhuman agents need to have for being perceived as having a mind and what effects mind perception has on attitudes, learning and performance in social interactions.
We examine how perception of robots modulates how people interact with them. In contrast to most other research on HRI, we use objective behavioral (e.g., fixations, reaction times, time spent on interaction) and neurophysiological (e.g., EEG measures and blood flow) measures to examine human attitudes and performance when interacting with social robots.
We examine cognitive offloading and embodied cognition. We are specifically interested in understanding to what extent humans incorporate their social and non-social environment when solving problems together with others. The goal is to understand whether humans make effective use of their internal and external resources and how their use of technology can be calibrated.