SFB 1528:  Cognition of Interaction

• Subject Area: Medicine ; Biology ; Computer Science, Systems and Electrical Engineering ; Physics ; Social and Behavioural Sciences
• Term: since 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 454648639

Much of the complexity of human behaviour and cognition has evolved from our need to interact, cooperate, and communicate in complex social groups. Evolutionary processes driving this development affect all primate species, human as well as non-human primates, because social interactions are of utmost importance to survival. The main scientific goal of the proposed CRC is to understand how fundamental cognitive functions, like perception, selective attention, action planning, and decision-making, contribute to social interactions at the behavioural and neuronal level. While these core cognitive functions and their neurobiological foundation have been subject to research in cognitive sciences already for decades, we will investigate them specifically in the context of dynamic interactions and decision-making between two or more individuals. We refer to this capacity as Cognition of Interaction. In particular, we will address the perception of faces and other social cues, prediction of visual sensory information and selective attention to others’ actions. In interactive dyadic settings, we will investigate the anticipation and representation of others’ intended actions, the partner choice and social learning. We will analyse the effect this has on valuation, planning, and the resulting selection of actions. We will approach the integration of these socio-cognitive capacities in a decision-making framework, inspired from economics as well as behavioural biology and ecology. In three main research areas, we will investigate:A) How individuals obtain information about others: “Seeing others” B) How they make inferences about others’ intentions and competence: “Assessing others” C) How pairs or groups interact and make joint decisions: “Interacting with others”Our aim is thus to achieve an integrative understanding of sensory, inferential, and choice-related aspects of the Cognition of Interaction.In the first step, we aim to understand how individual fundamental cognitive functions are employed in interactive behaviour and modulated by social context. Building on this, we want to understand how these functions act in concert to achieve cognitive flexibility, experience-based decisions, foresight, and strategic behaviour in social interactions. The long-term vision of this CRC is to understand how the outstanding capacity of cognitive functions and the widely connected neural networks in primate brains contribute to and are shaped by dynamic interactions, which are at the core of primate social behaviour. We take a truly transdisciplinary approach for understanding the cognition of dynamic interactive behaviour and its underlying brain functions. We combine approaches in cognitive, systems, and computational neuroscience and integrate them in a cognitive psychology and a behavioural biology perspective. Ultimately, with Cognition of Interaction, we strive for a comprehensive theory of cognition in dynamic interactive social contexts.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres
• International Connection: Israel

Current projects

• A01 - Perceptual consequences and the neural basis for integrating social information into perceptual decision-making (Project Head Treue, Stefan )
• A02 - Dissociating impacts of social, emotional, and motivational relevancies on perception and cognition (Project Head Schacht, Anne )
• A03 - Acquisition and use of social information in wild Assamese macaques (Project Heads Ostner, Ph.D., Julia ;  Schülke, Ph.D., Oliver )
• A04 - Faces in motion: temporal predictions from natural face sequences (Project Head Schwiedrzik, Caspar M. )
• A05 - Predictive processing of other’s actions (Project Head Wibral, Michael )
• A06 - Timescales and strategies of dyadic interactions (Project Head Priesemann, Viola )
• B01 - Action understanding and prediction during inter-agent interaction (Project Head Wörgötter, Florentin )
• B02 - Action observation, prediction, and execution in the cortical grasp network (Project Head Scherberger, Hansjörg )
• B03 - Levels of complexity of Theory of Mind – developmental and comparative perspectives (Project Head Rakoczy, Johannes )
• B04 - Recursive Theory of Mind during cooperative and competitive interactions in a social foraging task (Project Head Gläscher, Jan )
• B05 - Social evaluation and partner choice in the tolerant multi-level society of Guinea baboons (Project Head Fischer, Julia )
• B06 - Social learning in social networks: on the interplay between innovation, information transmission and individuals’ social value (Project Heads Ecker, Alexander ;  Fichtel, Claudia ;  Kappeler, Peter M. )
• C01 - Stochastic models for the optimal fusion of social and sensory information in transparent interactions (Project Head Wolf, Fred )
• C02 - Interindividual differences in transparent dyadic human interactions (Project Heads Gail, Alexander ;  Penke, Lars ;  Schacht, Anne )
• C03 - Ontogenetic pathway(s) to social reciprocity (Project Head Marschik, Peter )
• C04 - Little scientists, social apprentices: Curiosity-driven learning in dynamic social contexts (Project Head Mani, Nivedita )
• C05 - Spatial encoding in the fronto-parietal cortex of freely moving monkeys during social foraging (Project Head Gail, Alexander )
• C06 - Modelling group foraging, social learning, and their neural population correlates in freely behaving monkey (Project Head Schneidman, Ph.D., Elad )
• INF - Field Research Database and Deep Learning Video Pipeline – Data Management and Processing (Project Head Wieder, Philipp )
• Z - Central Taks of the Collaborative Research Centre (Project Head Gail, Alexander )
• Z01 - A framework for dynamic sensorimotor interactions in nonhuman primates and humans - Dyadic Interaction and Exploration Room Platforms (Project Heads Gail, Alexander ;  Kagan, Igor )
• Z02 - Action Capture Platform: deep learning for movement analysis and action classification (Project Heads Ecker, Alexander ;  Wörgötter, Florentin )
• Ö - Learning dispositions on nonhuman primate research (Project Head Bögeholz, Susanne )

• Applicant Institution: Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
• Participating Institution: Deutsches Primatenzentrum GmbH (DPZ); Leibniz-Institut für Primatenforschung; Max-Planck-Institut für Dynamik und Selbstorganisation (MPIDS); Weizmann Institute of Science
• Participating University: Universität Hamburg
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Alexander Gail