cSCAN is a multidisciplinary Research Centre in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow. Research in cSCAN addresses fundamental mechanisms of social perception, social cognition, and social interaction, and how to harness these for meaningful applications in social context.
Our research on social perception examines how humans process social signals in multiple channels, principally vision (faces, bodies) and audition (voices, language), and how the cultural, neural, and biological underpinnings of this processing affect interactions with artificial agents (e.g., social robots as well as avatars encountered in real or virtual realities). Our work on social cognition and interaction examines how emotions, language, social coordination, and culture shape social communication. Finally, we bring fundamental insights from these areas to bear on important societal issues in the digital economy, such as human-technology interactions.
We use a wide variety of state-of-the-art behavioural methods, often complemented by innovative neuroscience methods (e.g., fMRI, MEG) and computational modelling approaches.
cSCAN members lead a strong international research network, with editorial board membership of prominent journals (e.g., Psychological Science, JEP:General), substantial ERC and RCUK funding, and on-going research projects with industrial partners (e.g., Dimensional Imaging).