Harold Bekkering. "Predicting and interacting with others: The causal mechanisms of social cognition"

Humans are social animals, and social learning is a vital process in human culture with those around us serving as invaluable sources of inspiration, experience and knowledge. We observe the behaviour of others and its consequences and modify our current and future behaviour accordingly, however, we do so in different manners over the lifespan. In this colloquium, I like to discuss recent insights about social cognition, i.e., the causal learning mechanisms underlying the understanding and interacting with others from a computational, brain and lifespan perspective.