Research

2021 - present Experimental Emergence of Conventions
Conventions are an integral aspect of human communication and behavior. They can be defined as arbitrary and self-sustaining practices that emerge in a population that facilitate solving a coordination problem in repeated multi-agent interactions. Several open questions remain about the conditions under which conventions spontaneously form, how quickly they form depending on how much information is available to the agents, and how stable they are under different regimes. In this project, we study the experimental emergence of conventions in the laboratory under different conditions through computerized mulit-player tasks with human dyads to address these questions. The answers to these questions promise to yield significant advances for our understanding of how animal, including human, groups solve coordination problems, and thus also have potential impacts on our increasingly interconnected societies.

2021 - present Coordinated Problem Solving
Successfully navigating the world in collectives requires solving problems where members of the group may need to align their actions or take on different roles in a coordinated manner to achieve the goals of the individuals as well as the group. To efficiently do this, members of the group need to make use of information in their environment and about their conspecifics optimally. In this project, we study how common marmosets ( Callithrix jacchus ) deploy visual attention when solving such problems in a naturalistic setting to understand both what information is used and how. To do this, we use a combination of precise eye-tracking methods as well as deep learning and machine vision tools to track the positions and quantify the gaze of free-moving, socially interacting marmosets as they are engaged in coordinated problem-solving.

Past

2019 - 2021 Human Reasoning Abilities and Executive Functions
Designed and conducted experiments, using rules of formal logic, to understand the connection between executive functions and reasoning in different developmental stages

2018 - 2019 Agent Based Modelling of Cooperation
Used an agent-based model to better understand the role of cooperation in the survival of both individuals and groups in a community

2017 - 2018 Pulse Generating Circuit for NMR
Built a pulse-generating circuit for NMR using 555 timer IC for building an indigenous MRI machine