Our research focuses on the principles and mechanisms of human mutual understanding. Intuitively, humans understand one another because they share the same set of communicative signals such as words and gestures. However, that intuition neglects the extreme flexibility with which we employ our communicative signals in everyday social interaction. Neither can it account for our evolutionarily unique ability to instantly reach a shared understanding of new signals in the first place. Recent work is suggesting that human communicators share not signals but a fleeting cognitive space. This shared cognitive space provides context for selecting and interpreting communicative signals that can be mutually understood. The shared cognitive space is jointly coordinated and updated during social interaction, and that coordinated updating is altered in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder. I am also a member of the core team responsible for developing the FieldTrip toolbox for electrophysiological data analysis. As part of this open-source project, we have recently developed and shared a human intracranial data analysis protocol that guides intracranial researchers from the multitude of raw data files to integrated results in a transparent and reproducible way.  |