Social Cognition

A man with dark hair and glasses, Dr. Francys Subiaul, sits at a table in a colorful room and shows a child a screen while a woman sits with them and observes.

The Social Cognition Lab is interested in the development and evolution of social intelligence using both human and non-human animal models. We specialize in the study of children, dogs, and diverse non-human primates. Our work specifically focuses on a cornerstone of human intelligence: cultural learning.

We seek to identify the various cognitive, neural, and behavioral skills that underlie different forms of social learning. Our ultimate goal is to better understand which of these features are distinctive in our species and how they make cultural learning possible.

We would like to extend a sincere thank you to our institutional collaborators for enabling our research.

Learn more about our human subject and primate research by visiting our website:

Social Cognition Lab Website

Learn more about community-centered, canine cognition research by visiting our website:

Canine Cognition Collaborative

Participate

To join our child cognition research team, please email socialcoglabgwu [dot] edu (socialcoglab[at]gwu[dot]edu).

To join our dog cognition research team, please email canine [dot] cognitiongwu [dot] edu (canine[dot]cognition[at]gwu[dot]edu).

Research Interests

While social learning is widespread in the animal kingdom, cultural learning is rare. Our ability to rapidly, efficiently, and accurately copy others’ knowledge and responses across many different domains varying in abstractness underlies many of our species’ distinctive qualities including speech and writing as well as the use of complex tools. Our research with preschool age human children seeks to experimentally identify the basic psychological processes (e.g., executive functions mediating the attention, retention and updating of information) mediating different forms of social learning such as emulation (e.g., learning from another’s error), imitation (e.g., learning a novel response from another) and overimitation (e.g., copying responses known to be irrelevant). Because children go from being poor to exceptional social learners, these studies highlight the skills necessary to become a cultural learner. Comparative studies with non-human primates and domestic dogs using the same experimental approach allow us to identify which of these skills are likely to be unique to our species as well as explain why human and non-human social learning is so different.

Select Publications

Sexton CL, Buckley C, Lieberfarb J, Subiaul F, Hecht EE, Bradley BJ. What Is Written on a Dog’s Face? Evaluating the Impact of Facial Phenotypes on Communication between Humans and Canines. Animals. 2023; 13(14):2385. https://doi.org/10.3390/ani13142385

Renner E, Patterson EM, Subiaul, F (2020). Specialization in the vicarious learning of novel arbitrary sequences in humans but not orangutans. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, B. 375: 20190442.

Subiaul F, Stanton MA. Intuitive invention by summative imitation in children and adults. Cognition. 2020 Sep;202:104320. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104320. Epub 2020 Jul 4. PMID: 32634652.

Renner E, White JP, Hamilton AFC, Subiaul F. (2018). Neural responses when learning spatial and object sequencing tasks via imitation. PLoS One. 2018 Aug 3;13(8):e0201619. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0201619. eCollection.

Subiaul, F. (2016). What’s special about human imitation? A comparison with enculturated apes. Behavioral Sciences. 6 (16), doi:10.3390/bs6030013

Subiaul, F., Patterson, E., Renner, E., Schilder, B., Barr, R. (2014). Becoming a High Fidelity—Super—Imitator: The role of social and asocial learning in imitation development. Developmental Science. Nov;18(6):1025-35. doi: 10.1111/desc.12276. Epub 2014 Dec 28

For more publications visit Dr. Francys Subiaul's Google Scholar page.

Lab Researchers

Dr. Francys Subiaul – Lab Director

Nicole Jordan

Priscilla Graneur

Lara McCallister