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 Activities such as joint play,
hunting or foraging involve the use of shared information (e.g., about actions
of others), and require the representation and integration of social and
sensory information to guide the agents’ actions. We will establish a formal
theory and analysis framework for dyadic continuous perceptual report tasks
employed in this CRC. We will construct models for the formation and optimal
integration of representations for sensory and social information in a pair of
mutually interacting agents, construct methods for the data-driven inference of
inter-agent coupling and behavioural dynamics in the presence of temporal and
inter-individual variability, and theoretically predict optimal reporting
strategies to optimise expected reward for cooperative vs. competitive
settings.
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 We will investigate how the presence
and actions of a partner impact decisions of an individual and how
person-related factors shape the dynamic processes in dyadic interactions. We
will obtain individual levels of steroid hormones, personality traits, general
cognitive as well as socio-emotional abilities to test if these factors can
explain tendencies in social decision making. We will continuously record
eye-movement and use automated video analyses of facial expressions to align
these recordings with brain potentials, providing insight into the encoding, decoding
and integration of social cues in interactive dyadic decision making.
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 Understanding the relation between
postnatal brain development and neurofunctional changes in basic social, motor,
perceptual, and prelinguistic domains will open a unique window for deciphering
the ontogenesis of the complex social-cognitive faculty. With this project, we
will research a cohort of neurotypical infants during their first four months
of life and delineate the emergence of intentional social engagement in its
developmental context. This project taps on the ontogenetically youngest and
most fundamental forms of social reciprocity as the foundation for complex social
cognition and interaction.
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 Children are selective about which
objects in their environment they pay more attention to and learn more about.
This selective attention is likely to be influenced by what their partners in
social interactions are currently engaged with. Here, we examine children’s
learning of novel word-object associations in tasks, where children can see
which objects their partners chose to learn more about and the extent to which such
transparent interactions influence children’s exploration of the same objects. The
aim of the project is to examine the characterisation of learning as a dynamic
interaction between the child and the social context in which learning takes
place.
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 During social foraging individuals
need to decide which food item to collect in view of others‘ decisions. We will
investigate the spatial-cognitive processes and neural computations of action
value in fronto-parietal cortices of rhesus monkeys when non-social (food
location) and social (partner location) information have to be integrated
during foraging. We will study (i) the spatial-cognitive encoding of the
partner location and (ii) the encoding of action value associated with each
food source. This study will help understanding how spatial-cognitive factors
and action value are dynamically integrated in fronto-parietal decision
circuits during dyadic interactions.
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 To characterise design principles of
information sharing and inference in a social group we will expand and study a
novel family of theoretical models of group foraging, which regards
conspecifics as sources of information. We will then extend our receptive field
like models and maximum entropy based models of collective behaviour to
characterize social learning and dynamics of group foraging and learning tasks
in the lab and in the wild, studied by experimental groups in the CRC. Further,
we will use a new family of statistical models to characterise and analyse the
activity patterns of large neural populations recorded from monkey cortex
during lab experiments.
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