The effects of motivation-cognition interactions on skilled action

Most day-to-day activities clearly benefit from goal-directed cognitive control and enhanced motivation.  However, many people have the intuition that exerting too much control over our actions can be harmful, especially when under pressure to perform. How does enhanced motivation affect cognitive control processes?  How do these processes in turn affect skilled motor performance? What are the mechanisms by which enhanced motivation both supports and potentially hampers the activity of neural...

Towards a multi-level framework for human-AI interaction

How can we develop AI systems that can competently, ethically, and autonomously interact with all people? Understanding how human physiological, affective, and cognitive processes interact with...

Developing a cognitive approach to the study of human crowd dynamics from interdisciplinary perspectives

Most crowd-related disasters can be attributed to human behavior, or to the design of the built environment. The existing literature point to how visual factors, like crowd density,...

The time course of visual and conceptual contributions to scene categorization

Visual scene understanding is remarkably rapid. Over the past two decades, a number of features have been hypothesized as mechanisms that facilitate this ability, ranging from low-level visual features such as color and contours, to high-level conceptual features such as attributes and affordances. However, significant correlations exist across these features, making it difficult to assess the independent contributions of any given feature to scene categorization. We obtained...