Giovanni Pezzulo is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council in Rome, Italy. His research centers on the neuronal and computational mechanisms of predictive processing, goal-directed behaviour, and the sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition.

Human sensorimotor communication during human joint action: experimental and computational perspectives

During online social interactions, humans engage in various forms of non-linguistic communication. I will discuss recent research in my lab and others about sensorimotor communication (SCM): the study of the subtle communicative signals embedded within our everyday pragmatic actions. SMC is ubiquitous during realistic social interactions. For example, soccer players often carve their body movements in ways that are informative for their teammates or deceptive for their adversaries. Furthermore, we have many ways to perform the same goal-directed action – say, offer a glass of wine – and small kinematic differences can make the same action rude, polite or snobbish, thus potentially unveiling our hidden intentions. I will present some human-human experiments on SMC and discuss them in the context of a theoretical and computational model that we have been developing, and which considers both the costs and benefits of SMC (e.g., in terms of increased interaction success). More broadly, I will discuss our current understanding of the computational (and, in part, neural) mechanisms underlying social interaction at large, including e.g., action observation, prediction and planning mechanisms.

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Re background material:

For a good introduction https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0079876Photo by Uriel SC on Unsplash

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