Humans are never really alone - social interactions throughout our evolutionary history and our daily lives shape the contours of our cognition.
Our capacity for wellbeing and tendency towards pathology are deeply defined by our social environment and uniquely revealed within it. This makes our responses to the behaviours of others and how we act towards them a powerful tool. Previously I examined the social decision making behaviour of rats in a range of game theoretic tasks, finding that they were able to integrate ongoing social information with the history of rewards they had experienced to engage in sophisticated coordinated and cooperative behaviour. Here I work with humans, taking intuitions from game theory to design socially compelling and ethologically engaging games whilst measuring a range of biomarkers. My aim is to pinpoint the intersections between our behaviour, biology and experience that define how individual variation and group performance interact.
