Neural Network Models of Social Reasoning and Behavior

• Personality and Social Behavior
• Motivated Decision-making and Behavior
• Social Evaluation and Threat Perception
• Legal and Everyday Decision-making
• Coherence in Belief Systems, Belief Change attitude accessibility and the consistency of belief systems
• Impression Formation and person Perception

We are a group of faculty and graduate students studying the application of connectionist (neural network) models to social reasoning and social behavior. We are currently working on the following models:

• A neural network model of personality. 
• A neural network model of human motivation and motivated decision-making.
• A connectionist model of social evaluation, based on Cunningham’s Iterative Reprocessing model.
• A connectionist model of threat perception, with David Marsh
• A connectionist model of Cognitive Dissonance.
• Computational models of social behavior in response to threats.
• Computational models of online social behavior (GITHUB, Twitter, Reddit, etc.)

Current Projects

 A number of different projects with code and compiled versions can be found at:

https://github.com/SocialComputation

Associated Faculty

Stephen J. Read (Psychology)

Lynn C. Miller (Annenberg School and Psychology)

In addition, a number of individuals in a variety of other departments are also actively investigating computational models (Linguistics, Psychology (Cognitive and Clinical), Computer Science, and the Neural, Informational, and Behavioral Sciences Program (NIBS)).

Students

• Minwoo Ahn
• Peter Wang
• Alice Qiao
• Xiao Liu
• Komal Patri

Hardware

• one 20 core HP computing cluster
• one 12 core HP workstation

Software

Emergent Neural Network simulation software.

• https://github.com/emer
• https://github.com/emer/emergent/wiki

Thagard’s ECHO program for parallel constraint satisfaction models

• http://cogsci.uwaterloo.ca/Index.html