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| Brief biography of Prof. Harold Bekkering |
Harold Bekkering (1965) is Professor in Cognitive Psychology at the Radboud University Nijmegen since 2002. Before he worked at Universities in Maastricht, St. Louis (USA) and Groningen. Furthermore he was a senior scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Psychological Research in Munich.
At the moment, prof. Bekkering is member of the Board of Directors of the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour. Prof. Bekkering’s research interests covers the broad field of Cognitive Neuroscience including Cognitive, Social and Developmental aspects with implications for Cognitive Robotics and Educational Neuroscience. He co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed papers in journals like Science, Nature, Nature Neuroscience and important Psychology and Neuroscience journals. He has received prestigious national (VICI, TOP, Gravitation) and international grants (FP5, FP6) and he is leading a substantial research group called “Action and NeuroCognition”. More information. |
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| Abstract |
Successful social interaction demands humans to predict others’ behavior. To do so, internal models of others are generated based on previous observations. Prof. Bekkering will first outline basic concepts of Predictive Coding, a unifying theory that stresses that the brain in essence is a prediction machine, in the context of social cognition. Then, he will present some recent behavioral as well as Neuroimaging (fMRI and MEG) experiments that investigate the underlying neural mechanisms of predictions and importantly, prediction-errors in social situations, i.e., performances at the bowling lane, but also more categorical predictions about object preferences. Together, these studies provide novel insights into the neural mechanisms underlying the learning of individual and group-knowledge when predicting others’ behavior. |
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