The Department of Psychology at the University of Miami invites applications for two full-time, tenure-eligible, or tenure-track faculty members to join our department in August 2024. One position is in the department’s Adult Division, and the other is the Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience division. The specific area for both positions is open. For the Adult Division, areas of focus could include basic research on affect, cognitive science, and/or mechanistic studies related to mental health or the impact of disparities. Scholars with expertise in lab-based experimental, neurophysiological, computational, and/or mobile health/digital phenotyping methods are welcome. Individuals with interests in data science, including advanced quantitative techniques, big data, and machine learning are also encouraged to apply. For the Cognitive & Behavioral Neuroscience Division, we are particularly interested in individuals who incorporate innovative and sophisticated cognitive, affective, or social neuroscience methods into their research program.

In this lecture, I would like to share with the broad audience the empirical results gathered and the theoretical advancements made in the framework of the Lendület project entitled ’The cognitive basis of human sociality’. The main objective of this project was to understand the mechanisms that enable the unique sociality of humans, from the angle of cognitive science. In my talk,  I will focus on recent empirical evidence in the study of three fundamental social cognitive functions (social categorization, theory of mind and social learning; mainly from the empirical lenses of developmental psychology) in order to outline a theory that emphasizes the need to consider their interconnectedness. The proposal is that the ability to represent the social world along categories and the capacity to read others’ minds are used in an integrated way to efficiently assess the epistemic states of fellow humans by creating a shared representational space. The emergence of this shared representational space is both the result of and a prerequisite to efficient learning about the physical and social environment.