EVENT: Psychology Colloquium: Prof James Enns: Social Signals and Sensorimotor Control: Busy traffic on a two-way street

Prof James Enns - Department of Psychology, The University of British Columbia

James Enns is a distinguished University Scholar and Professor in the Department of Psychology at UBC and an Adjunct Professor at UWA working with Troy Visser on collaborative grants. He is also currently the Editor of the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. His research interests in perception over the past 30 years have been varied, but they always seem to return to questions of how selective attention works in conjunction with human development, expertise, task goals, and most recently, the social environment.

Title: Social Signs and Sensorimotor Control: Busy traffic on a two-way street

ABSTRACT

Research will be presented that explores the two-way relations between selective attention and social interaction. This work takes seriously the possibilities that (1)'people watching' can be an important contributor to sensorimotor processes and (2) when people interact with one another in cognitive tasks they alter the operation of selective attention. The Research explores such questions as, 'when are two heads better than one?', "how does social perception influence our action?" and "how sensitive is our perception of social synergy in collaborative cognition?"