Natalie Sebanz

Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary

"How t(w)o perform actions together"

About the talk

Humans are remarkable in their capacity to engage with other humans in joint actions? How does the ability to perform actions together develop? And why is it so difficult to have robots engage in smooth interactions with humans and with each other? In this talk, I will review recent studies addressing two key ingredients of joint action: how individuals include others in their action planning, and how they achieve the fine-grained temporal coordination that is essential for many different types of joint action. I will discuss how social relations between individuals and groups modulate these processes of action planning and coordination. The next challenge for joint action research will be to understand how joint action enables learning. This will allow us to understand what it takes for people to become experts in particular joint actions, and how experts teach individual skills through performing joint actions with novices.

About the speaker

Natalie studied psychology and psycholinguistics in Innsbruck, Austria, and then joined the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich in 2001. Having received her PhD from LMU Munich in 2004 she spent the following years working as a post-doc and later as an Assistant Professor at Rutgers University, NJ, and as a lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK. In 2008, Natalie was appointed as an Associate Professor at the Donders Centre for Cognition, Radboud University Nijmegen, and started a five year project on the "Cognitive and Neural Mechanisms of Joint Action" (funded by a EURYI grant from the European Science Foundation). She is interested in how perception, action, and cognition contribute to social interaction in humans and other animals. For more information on my research go to somby.info