RESEARCH TOPICS
Social minds: Communication and sociality across development, cultures, and species
My research explores how humans communicate, learn from others, and develop social understanding, with a particular focus on childhood. I study preschoolers, a period when social and communicative abilities develop rapidly, to understand how children interact with others, evaluate information, decide whom and what to trust, and use information from their social environment to build knowledge and make sense of the world around them.
Sociality and communication. I examine how children''s social and communicative abilities develop during the preschool years, and how they use them to navigate their social environment.
Learning from others. I investigate how young children evaluate the information they receive, and how they use both its content and its source to decide whom and what to trust.
The role of culture. I explore how cultural environments shape social and communicative development by comparing children and adults across diverse societies, including small-scale populations.
Beyond humans: primates and social robots. To better understand what is distinctive about human communication, I investigate communication and cognition in non-human primates. I also explore what social robots, as novel communication partners, can reveal about how humans communicate and learn from others.
From research to society. Understanding these processes has important practical implications. Research can inform educational practices that support the development of communicative and social skills from the early school years, as well as approaches that foster the critical evaluation of information in a world of increasingly diverse and competing sources. It can also contribute to the responsible design of social robots and other technologies intended to interact with children.
RESEARCH TEAM
Co-PI Comparative Minds Research Group
https://www.udg.edu/ca/grupsrecerca/comparative-minds-research-group
RESEARCHER ID
ORCID: 0000-0001-9415-1771 / Web of Science: AGZ-3927-2022 / Scopus: 57226098012
EDUCATION
2024-present | Serra Húnter Fellow (Associate professor) / University of Girona
2022-2024 | Serra Húnter Fellow (Assistant professor) / University of Girona
2020-2022 | Postdoctoral researcher / University of Neuchâtel - Centre for Cognitive Sciences
2017-2020 | Assistant professor / University of Costa Rica - Institute for Psychological Research
2013-2016 | Ph.D. in Cognitve Psychology / CNRS - Institute for Cognitive Sciences