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

Recent alumni

News

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.