Cognition and Communication research
The department of applied IT conducts foundational and applied research on questions concerning human cognition and communication – at the individual, group and organisational levels. This research explores the social and psychological conditions of human- and automated-interaction in today’s digitalised and globalised world.
Approximately twenty lecturers, PhD students and post-doctoral researchers with an interdisciplinary background, including psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, informatics, media and communications, philosophy, programming and AI works within the field of cognition and communication.
Research
Some of the salient foci of our researchers are:
- Equipping social robots with affective computing capabilities to enable meaningful interaction between humans and robots, with certain applications in mind, including cognitive therapy, education and autonomous vehicles
- The language and psychology of influence
- The technological mind – both how cognition changes and adapts to an ever-changing technological and digital landscape, and the use of cognitive modelling to develop mind-inspired AI
- Communication about, and modelling the consequences of, climate change
- Memory of fictional information: how people encode and retrieve memories of, for example, books, movies, and video games, as distinct from memories of real events
- Network analyses of behaviour, cognition and the brain, to explain many phenomena that are complex and interlinked - for example, how the brain effectively processes information; identifying linked socio-cognitive factors relating to long-term health and online communication
- How digitalisation affects communication and how digital technologies can be used to study communication
- Decision-making
- Organisational communication
