The Department of Psychology at UC San Diego invites applications for a tenure-track Assistant Professor position focused on computational and theoretical mechanisms of behavior and/or its neural bases. The selected candidate will be responsible for establishing a rigorous, high-quality research program that complements existing departmental strengths in Behavioral Neuroscience, Cognitive Psychology, Developmental Psychology, and/or Social Psychology. Additional responsibilities include teaching graduate and undergraduate level courses and mentoring students within the Department of Psychology, as well as participating in department and university service.

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.