Profile

cSCAN is a uniquely interdisciplinary Research Centre in the School of Psychology and Neuroscience at the University of Glasgow that brings together researchers from complementary disciplines including Psychology, Neuroscience, Cognitive Science, Computer Science and Engineering to examine fundamental questions in social perception, cognition, and interaction, and how to harness these for meaningful applications in social context.

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Research Vision

Our research on social perception examines how humans process social signals in multiple channels, principally vision (faces, bodies) and audition (voices, language), and how the cultural, neural, and biological underpinnings of this processing affect interactions with artificial agents (e.g., social robots as well as avatars encountered in real or virtual realities). Our work on social cognition  and interaction examines how emotions, language, social coordination, and culture shape social communication.  Finally, we bring fundamental insights from these areas to bear on important societal issues in the digital economy, such as human-technology interactions.

Our complementary research teams also develop and apply a wide variety of innovative behavioral methods, brain imaging technologies, virtual reality environments, and computational modeling techniques. As part of our interdisciplinary environment, cSCAN members participate in the UKRI Centre for Doctoral Training (CDT) in Socially Intelligent Artificial Agents in partnership with the School of Computing Science and collaborate with the Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging (CCNi).

Our cSCAN members also lead an international research network, with AE roles and editorial board membership of prominent journals (e.g., Psychological Science, JEP: General, Cognition, PNAS), substantial national and international funding (e.g., ERC, RCUK, ONR MURI, DARPA), and a range of UK Trusts and Foundations and industrial partners (e.g., FurHat Robotics, Dimensional Imaging).