My main scholarly interest pertains to the evolutionary origins of the uniqueness of human mind. The core hypothesis is that a few evolutionary events added to pre-existing abilities should explain most of human fascinating social abilities, for example empathy, theory of mind, language or skill transmission. In practice, the goal is to naturalize these social abilities by using in vivo investigation of the neurophysiology of these functions with fMRI, combined with behavioral and eyetracking studies, and comparing people with disabilities in social interactions (autism spectrum, schizophrenia).
The specificity of my work is to use artificial agents, humanoid robots and computer animated avatars, as controls to highlight which behavioural functions and physiological mechanisms are specific to interacting with a real human (ie a social interaction) in contrast to being generic mechanisms exapted to contribute to social functions. For example, processing of the human-shape is a generic mechanism that also responds to human-like robots, whereas the attribution of mental states (intentional stance) is specific to interactions with real humans.
I will present examples of the applications of these research, that is not limited to knowledge about the physiology of social interactions but also pertains to the understanding of pathologies of social interactions, to scientifically-guided optimization of the social competence of artificial agents, and to the validation and optimization of these artificial agents for the therapies of disorders of social cognition such as the autism spectrum disorder.
Finally I will present new lines of research, currently under development, to investigate higher cognitive processes, in particular related to social interactions and conversations, in naturalistic settings despite the constraints of the fMRI scanning environment. The objective is to naturalize, in terms of physiology (neurophysiology, autonomic system, hormones), complex situations of social interactions that otherwise can’t be investigated with a classical experimental approach.