The Motivated Cognition Lab respectfully honours and acknowledges the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), & səlilwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) peoples, the original inhabitants of whose unceded & occupied lands we live, learn, unlearn and create research and knowledge on as uninvited guests.
Overview:
How can two people, in the same place at the same time, perceive completely different worlds? Why do people notice some things in their world and not others, leading to these very different experiences — even though we humans share a biological form? These are questions that have driven our lab’s research since it was established in 2013. Attention is a key process that determines what we see by tuning our senses to what matters in a given situation at a given time. In particular, we have focused on how diverse life experiences guide attention to aspects of our surroundings that have been uniquely important to our survival and wellbeing. In other words, how do we tune ourselves to attend to the world, and what worlds do we tune ourselves to? How do our affectively laden experiences and histories of interaction tune us to experience possible worlds?
Much of our research has focused on addressing these questions measuring brain and physiological activity while people do computer-based tasks in the lab. Yet so much of how we learn what’s important to attend occurs during interactions with others. This recognition underpins much of our current work, which builds on our past research to examine on how interaction dynamics during a shared task— food preparation, drawing, dancing, moving furniture – shape what matters from moment to moment, outside the lab, in the real world.
Academic publications can be found here.
Samples of Current Projects:
Participatory Sensemaking and the Third Entity
Collaborative Kitchen Cognition
In this mixed-methods research program, we test how affect-biased attention is shaped by meaningful everyday interactive processes such as those observed during food preparation or cooking.
Table Study
In everyday tasks requiring joint action between partners, do subjective experiences of agency and coordination reflect 3rd person measures of the degree and quality of coordination? When coordination is high, is this reflected in more synchronized heartbeats?
Patterns of social brain development
What patterns of brain activity make each person unique? How do these patterns change as children grow up and develop social skills? This line of research, in collaboration with Dr. Tamara Vanderwal, examines how the stability of children’s brain patterns, and the similarity of these patterns to peers, relates to social and emotional development. This research helps us understand how the brain matures alongside the major social changes that occur during childhood and adolescence, from developing friendships and becoming part of larger social circles to gaining independence from parents.