Co-Mind Lab

Welcome!

Welcome to the website for the Communicative Mind Laboratory (Co-Mind) in the Department of Communication at UCLA. We conduct research on the cognitive science of communication. Our focus is on dynamics: how communication and cognition are coordinated in time. The lab's research involves a diversity of methods, including corpus and large-scale data analysis, behavioral experimentation, and computational modeling. We are located in Rolfe Hall.

Encounter VIII, Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, UCLA

People

• Encounter VIII: Lab Mascot, UCLA
• Rick Dale: Professor, Communication, UCLA
• Grace Qiyuan Miao: Ph.D. Student, Communication Science @ UCLA
  
• Constance Bainbridge: Ph.D. Student, Communication Science @ UCLA
  Main affiliation: Bryant Lab
• Joyce Yanru Jiang: Ph.D. Student, Communication Science @ UCLA
  
• Lin Lin: Ph.D. Student, Communication Science @ UCLA
  Main affiliations: Stroessner / Johnson
• Z.P. Rosen: Ph.D. Student, Communication Science @ UCLA

Recent alumni

• Jenny Roche (advisee), Ph.D. (U. Memphis, Spring, 2011)
  Postdoc, Rochester; Faculty, Kent State University
• Nick Duran (postdoc), Ph.D. (U. Memphis, Spring, 2015)
  Faculty, Arizona State University
• Janelle Szary (co-advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2015)
  Postdoc, Indiana University; Data Scientist, pymetrics
• Alexandra Paxton (advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Fall, 2015)
  Postdoc, UC Berkeley; Faculty, UConn
• Drew Abney (collaborator), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2016)
  Postdoc, Indiana University; Faculty, U. Georgia
• Till Bergmann (co-advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2016)
  Insight Data Fellow, Palo Alta, CA; Data Scientist, SalesForceIQ
• David Vinson (advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Fall, 2017)
  Former IBM Ph.D. Fellow; AI Researcher, Accenture
• Maryam Tabatabaeian (advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2017)
  Insight Data Fellow, Palo Alta, CA; Data Scientist, Cisco
• Alexia Galati (postdoc), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2018)
  Faculty, UNCC
• Camila Alviar (co-advisee), Ph.D. (UC Merced, Spring, 2021)
  Postdoc, Vanderbilt
• Pablo Contreras Kallens (co-advisee), Ph.D. (Cornell University, Spring 2023)
  Postdoc, Saarland University

Resources

Full list of lab publications

Core lab reading

Human communication is incredibly complex, and in face-to-face interactions it is supported by many cognitive processes in a rich multimodal tapestry. These reviews and theoretical discussions summarize some core questions we face in explaining it.

(long read) Dale, R., Fusaroli, R., Duran, N. D., & Richardson, D. C. (2013). The self-organization of human interaction. In B. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation (pp. 43-95). Academic Press.

(short read) Dale, R., Kello, C. T. & Schoenemann, P. T. (2016). Seeking synthesis: The integrative problem in understanding language and its evolution. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 371-381.

We use multiple methods in the lab, including (1) analysis of social media, (2) behavioral experimentation, and (3) computational modeling

(1) Fusaroli, R., Perlman, M., Mislove, A., Paxton, A., Matlock, T. & Dale, R. (2015). Timescales of massive human entrainment. PLOS ONE, 10, e0122742.

(2) Main, A., Paxton, A. & Dale, R. (2016). An exploratory analysis of emotion dynamics between mothers and adolescents during conflict discussions. Emotion, 16, 913-928.

(3) Duran, N. D., Dale, R. & Galati, A. (2016). Towards integrative dynamic models for adaptive perspective-taking. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 761-779.

Code / data

R libraries: The Co-Mind Lab has collaborated with others on the creation of the following R libraries: crqa, cmscu, crqanlp, and sindyr

Some downloadable code and data

Sentgen. A (quasi-)ANSI-C program that is a generalized phrase-structure grammar interpreter (written by Rick Dale). Doug Rohde provides a great piece of related software called SLG. While sentgen may be quick to setup for simple purposes, Rohde's program is much more powerful if you have a complex project in mind.

Mouse-movement analysis software (written by Darren Hearn). This archive contains example data files and analysis programs for MATLAB. I also have lots of little scripts analyzing mouse movements for MATLAB. Feel free to request them.

Rick's GitHub page.