My research investigates how internal cognitive and perceptual processes are grounded in the social world. In the standard information processing accounts of cognition, the theoretical model is of a cognitive system that thinks and acts in isolation. Accordingly, laboratory experiments quarantine subjects away from a social context. While this approach has been extremely productive in mapping out the behavioural and anatomical components of cognition, it risks excluding critical phenomena from the laboratory. Neuroscientists are now discovering that the brain is highly tuned to social information, yet such variables are not often part of cognitive theories. While the tools of cognitive psychology are being used to study social phenomena to great effect, the potential impact of social context upon cognitive and perceptual processing is rarely explored. In my research, I find that a rich interaction between cognitive and social factors plays out in the eye movements of people perceiving the world, acting upon it, and communicating with each other.

In my laboratory, two linked eye tracking systems, that I have designed and built from scratch, unobtrusively record the speech and gaze of freely interacting subjects. This unique technology allows me to quantify the moment-by-moment gaze coordination between two people. I am able to ask a number of questions relating perceptual processes to cognitive processes and social factors: (1) How is cognition grounded in the social world? (2) How do people use their visual and social environment when remembering non-visual information? (3) How do people coordinate their gaze during a real-time conversation? (4) How does language influence how we see the world? I support the results from my eye tracking lab with a range of other methodologies: reaction time studies, survey data, and experiments with different populations, such as typically and atypically developing infants.