Members

Esther Papies (Healthy Cognition Lab)

Dr Esther Papies is currently the Director of cSCAN. She also directs the Healthy Cognition Lab, which studies the cognitive processes underlying the regulation of health and consumer behavior and behavior change, especially in the domain of healthy and sustainable eating and drinking. Her research uses mainly social cognition methods and focuses on the cognitive processes of how behavior is regulated as a function of cognitive representations shaped by personal goals, previous experiences, and environmental cues that trigger and shape these cognitive representations. Specifically, her research team addresses questions such as: how are appetitive stimuli represented cognitively, and how does desire for them develop? How can we leverage these processes to promote healthy and sustainable consumer behaviour? Currently, her work is funded through various ESRC Research Grants and PhD studentships.

Larry Barsalou (Barsalou Lab)

Prof. Lawrence Barsalou is Professor of Psychology at the University of Glasgow, performing research in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. He received a Bachelors degree in Psychology from the University of California, San Diego in 1977, and a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Stanford University in 1981. Since then, Barsalou has held faculty positions at Emory University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and the University of Chicago, joining the University of Glasgow in 2015. Barsalou’s research addresses the nature of human conceptual processing and its roles in perception, memory, language, thought, social interaction, and health cognition. A current theme of his research is that the conceptual system is grounded in multimodal simulation, situated conceptualization, and embodiment. Specific topics of current interest include the roles of conceptual processing in emotion, stress, abstract thought, self, appetitive behaviour, and contemplative practices. His research also addresses the dynamic online construction of conceptual representations, the development of conceptual systems to support goal achievement, and the structure of knowledge.

Emily Cross (Social Brain in Action Lab)

Emily S. Cross is a Professor of Social Robotics at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, where she directs the Social Brain in Action Laboratory Using interactive learning tasks, brain scanning, and dance, acrobatics and robots, she explores how we learn by watching others throughout the lifespan, how action experts’ brains enable them to perform physical skills so exquisitely, and the social influences that shape human-robot interaction. She currently serves as PI on an ERC starting grant that combines social neuroscience with social robotics. Emily received undergraduate and graduate degrees in the USA and New Zealand, and completed postdoctoral training in the UK and Germany. Prior to Glasgow, she held faculty positions in the Netherlands and Wales. Her research has been supported national and international organisations including the National Institutes of Health (USA), Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, Economic and Social Research Council, Ministry of Defence, Leverhulme Trust, and the European Research Council.

Rachael Jack (Social Psychophysics)

Rachael Jack is Professor of Computational Social Cognition in the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology. Her research focuses on understanding social communication within and across cultures, particularly non-verbal signals such as facial expressions. Jack’s team uses an interdisciplinary approach combining social psychology, vision science and psychophysics, dynamic 3D computer graphics, mathematical psychology, and information theory. Specifically, Jack’s work revealed cultural specificities in facial expressions of emotion; that four, not six, expressive patterns are cross-cultural; and that facial expressions transmit information in a hierarchical structure over time. Together, Jack’s work has challenged the dominant view that six basic facial expressions of emotion are universal, leading to a new theoretical framework of facial expression communication that now informs the design of culturally sensitive digital agents. Jack’s laboratory is funded by the European Research Council (ERC) to lead the research program. Computing the Face Syntax of Social Face Signals. Jack’s work has featured in several high-profile scientific outlets (e.g., Annual Review of Psychology, Current Biology, PNAS, TICS).

Stacy Marsella

Prof. Stacy Marsella’s interest is in the computational modeling of cognition, emotion and social behavior, both as a basic research methodology in the study of human behavior as well as the use of these computational models in a range of education and analysis applications. Marsella’s current research spans the interplay of emotion and cognition, modeling the influence that Theory of Mind, beliefs about the mental processes of others, has on social interaction and the role of nonverbal behavior in face-to-face interaction. Key applications of these models includes the design of virtual humans, software entities that look human and interact with humans in virtual environments using spoken dialog as well as large scale modeling and simulation of social behavior.

Frank Pollick

Professor Frank Pollick is currently doing research across a variety of topics in cognition, visual perception and human interactions with technology, particularly as they impact mental health in the workplace. Current funded projects investigate the role of trust in optimising the performance of human-AI teams as well as neurostimulation as a means to mitigate visually induced motion sickness in VR. Previous work has focused on issues in social cognition and particularly the perception of human movement and how this ability varies across different groups due to development and expertise. This work has included research into autism, dance and the multisensory perception of drumming. The research methods employed by the lab include behavioural and brain imaging studies using fMRI, with recent research exploring the capabilities of realtime fMRI neurofeedback.

Sara Sereno (iTrack Lab)

Affiliate members

Editorial Board Memberships

Our members hold positions on the editorial boards of many international journals, including Acta Psychologia, Adaptive Human Behavior & Physiology, Appetite, Archives of Sexual Behavior, British Journal of Psychology, Behavior Research Methods, Cognition, Collabra, Evolution & Human Behavior, Frontiers in Psychology, International Journal of Humanoid Robotics, Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Psychological Science, Social Cognition, Social Psychology, and Testing, Psychometrics & Methodology in Applied Psychology.