I intend to continue pursue follow-up research along all of the research threads mentioned above. In addition, I am very excited about some new areas of research that my group has only begun to investigate: affective cognition, social cognition, economic decision-making.
Social Cognition
In terms of social cognition, I am interested in how groups of individuals deliberately or incidentally share information while trying to achieve collective and/or individual goals in various competitive and cooperative settings.
For example, we have begun examining the role of social information in competitive foraging (Ahmad & Yu, 2015), a scenario in which many decentralized agents competing for patches of resources can quickly converge onto the Nash equilibrium solution of matching reward-to-group-size ratio with limited social information (as also having been observed in ducks and other animals).
We intend to investigate a much broader class of problems in social decision-making, with implications for electoral voting, economic choice, dating, and social networking.
Artificial Intelligence
On the artificial intelligence side, I feel that my research has yielded some interesting and novel neuroscience-based insights that could contribute to improving state of the art machine learning and AI algorithms, such as unsupervised and self-supervised representation learning, multimodal learning, lifelong learning, and trustworthy AI.
Related Papers
- Paulus, M P & Yu, A J (2012). Emotion and decision-making: Affect-driven belief systems in anxiety and depression. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 16: 476-483.
- Ahmad, S & Yu, A J (2014). A socially aware Bayesian model for competitive foraging. Proceedings of the Cognitive Science Society Conference.
