Eshin Jolly

How do our brains represent another person? Is it the way they look? The way they sound? Their favorite foods, music, hobbies? Their friend group? The friends you have in common? A meaningful experience you share?

How does learning a juicy piece of gossip about them change that representation? Do you remember them differently? Talk about them differently? Feel differently, when you next interact with them?

During social interactions our brains routinely perform these types of computations, and yet we know surprisingly little about what's happening under-the-hood. My research program aims to build a naturalistic interdisciplinary science of how minds interact; how we learn, represent, remember, and share information about other people through social interactions. My group draws inspiration from multiple scientific disciplines including: computational cognitive neuroscience, social psychology & behavioral economics, and machine-learning & artificial-intelligence.

We love exploring: 

(a) new ways to measure human experience 

(b) new empirical approaches that bring the social world into the lab 

(c) new software tools and computational methods to facilitate the next generation of experimental design and analysis

This enables things like: 

(a) employing naturalistic fMRI to study how we spontaneously represent and remember other minds 

(b) building large-scale online multiplayer games to study the emergence and utility of gossip

(c) developing affective utility models to explain social-emotions like guilt and indebtedness

(d) releasing open-source tools for analyzing facial expressions, fMRI data, computational modeling and more

• Jolly, E., Sadhukha, S., Iqbal, M., Molani, Z., Walsh, T.M., Manning, J.R., & Chang, L.J. (under review). People are represented and remembered through their relationships with others. [Link]
• Jolly, E.*, Cheong, J.H.*, Xie, T.*, Byrne, S. Kenny, M., & Chang, L.J. (2023). Py-Feat: Python Facial Expression Analysis Toolbox. Affective Science. [Link] [Toolbox]
• Jolly, E., Farrens, M., Greenstein, N., Eisenbarth, H., Reddan, M.C., Andrew, E., Wager, T.D., & Chang, L.J. (2022). Recovering individual emotional states from sparse ratings using collaborative filtering. Affective Science. [Link] [Toolbox]
• Jolly, E. & Chang, L.J. (2021). Gossip drives vicarious learning and facilitates social connections. Current Biology, 31, 1-11. [Link]
• Chang, L.J., Jolly, E., Cheong, J.H., Rapuano, K., Greenstein, N., Chen, P.A., & Manning, J.R. (2021). Endogenous variation in ventromedial prefrontal cortex state dynamics during naturalistic viewing reflects affective experience. Science Advances, 7(17), 1-17. [Link]
• Jolly, E., & Chang, L.J. (2019). The Flatland Fallacy: Moving Beyond Low Dimensional Thinking. Topics in Cognitive Science, 1-22. [Link]

Updated September 2024