Current members

Megan Chiovaro is currently a Ph.D. student in the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) at the University of Connecticut. She received her bachelor’s degrees in Mathematics and Psychology from the State University of New York at Oneonta in 2018. Her work focuses on collective intelligence in human and non-human groups and how each may inform the other. Megan is particularly interested in the group processes of the social insect Apis mellifera, the Western honeybee. As a seasoned beekeeper, she uses live colonies to carry out behavioral research on phenomena such as ‘swarming’ and ‘task-allocation’. Her work encompasses an ecological approach to ecology and collective intelligence, and presents a novel path for engineering efficacious human collectives void of a central controller.

Contact: megan.chiovaro@uconn.edu

Website: mchiovaro.github.io

Ashley Dhaim is a fifth year PhD student in the Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA) at UConn. She earned her B.A. in psychology from the College of the Holy Cross in 2015. Her current research is asking how social cognition and social coordination in children come to develop and interact with one another. Her other research interests include interpersonal synchrony, dynamical systems, social affordances, and learning.

Contact: ashley.dhaim@uconn.edu

Bert Hodges is Senior Research Scientist at UConn, and Emeritus Professor of Psychology at Gordon College in MA. He is affiliated with the Social Division and CESPA, his research integrates issues in social psychology (e.g., conformity & dissent), ecological psychology (e.g., coordination, care), and cognitive science (e.g., language, reasoning, remembering). The major thrust of his work has been directed toward developing and applying an ecological account of values in social psychology, language, and perception-action-cognition. Values are ecosystem constraints on fields of action that are required for animate beings to perceive and improve their activities. Thus, values are not goals, rules, or natural laws; they do not “belong” to individuals, cultures, or objects. Rather, they are the relational dynamics that make life and its flourishing possible. Prior research has explored how this works out practically in social dilemmas (e.g., what to do with others whom you believe are wrong); social learning (e.g., selectivity and fidelity in imitation); social coordination (e.g., conditions under which mimicry and alignment happen or not); physical coordination (e.g., how walking is affected by the nature of what is carried, and how carefulness might be perceived); conversational pragmatics (e.g., why and how we speak with others in ways that are truthful, creative, and caring); the evolution of walking, carrying, and conversing (e.g., are they related); and time perception (e.g., how do affordances and actions shape timing).

Contact: bert.hodges@uconn.edu

Shu Jiang is a sixth-year graduate student in the Language and Behavior Cultural Lab at UConn. She earned her B.S. in sports psychology in China and completed her master’s in counseling psychology at Springfield College. Her current research focuses on how socio-cultural environments influence experience, expression, and perception of the self and what implications these processes have on health and well-being. Her other research interests include person perception and language analysis.

Contact: shu.2.jiang@uconn.edu

Laura Cuijpers is a lecturer at the Center for Human Movement Sciences at the University of Groningen, affiliated with the Social Division and CESPA. In her research, she studies coordination dynamics of crew rowing, exploring the possibility of rowing in antiphase coordination, both in the lab and on the water. To that end, she developed her own measurement system using Arduino (i.e., open-source computer hardware and software that allows building digital devices and interactive objects).

She is continuing her research in social coordination together with Dr. N. Koudenburg and Prof. K.L. Marsh. Using empirical examples from rowing, dance and martial arts, they propose a theoretical framework on how joint action and breakdowns affects psychological unity and agency. She is researching movement practices such as the Feldenkrais Method from a dynamical systems perspective as proposed by Esther Thelen, investigating intra- and interpersonal differences on balance, mobility and body awareness. As a lecturer, she aspires to create a learning environment that invites experiences and reflection upon those and developed a movement workshop to enable students to experience theoretical concepts of motor development and learning (e.g., affordances, constraints, control parameter and self-organisation) by moving themselves.

Contact: l.s.cuijpers@gmail.com
Website: www.drlauracuijpers.com

Kerry Marsh is a Professor of Psychological Sciences who supervises graduate students in the Social division, and occasionally in PAC. Although trained to study motivated cognition and attitude functions from a traditional social cognitive perspective, she has increasingly moved toward studying attitude-behavior and judgmental processes using more richly embedded and dynamic multimodal processes, using immersive virtual reality, for instance. Since 2006 she has advocated an approach to social psychology that is more radically embodied and embedded by taking a Gibsonian ecological approach to social perception and to joint action. To that end, she has developed novel ways of examining the emergence of interpersonal synergies – from examining how individuals in rocking chairs are pulled to synchronize their chair movement as a function of seeing or hearing others’ rocking (and how music affects such sync), to studying the emergence of cooperative action using a plank moving task. Bringing a perception-action perspective to environmental psychology, she examines a variety of human-environment-technology issues such as social influence processes during emergency evacuation of virtual buildings, and how drivers within a semiautonomous car (AV) and those outside of the vehicle (pedestrians and nonAV drivers) coordinate action with AVs.

Contact: Kerry.L.Marsh@uconn.edu

Lab alumni

Cassidy is a third-year doctoral student working in the Social Division with Dr. Kerry Marsh at both Storrs and Hartford campuses. She received her B.A. in Psychology and Sociology from Rutgers University and recently completed her M.S. at UConn in Psychological Sciences. Her work deals with the visual perception of the environment and how this affects judgments and impressions of people acting and interacting within the environment.

Contact: cassidy.burt@uconn.edu

Dr. Tucker is a Research Psychologist at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) and received her PhD in Psychology at UConn’s Center for the Ecological Study of Perception and Action (CESPA). Her research interests include interpersonal coordination, navigation / wayfinding, human-computer interaction, and dynamical and complex systems. Her current projects center on countermeasures to increase seat belt use. Past research projects have assessed route and exit choice of building occupants during emergency evacuations, place and distance perception through locomotion without vision, speed perception during driving, and app-based distracted driving interventions.

Contact: andrew.tucker@uconn.edu

Christina Bibinski, former undergraduate research assistant. christina [dot] bibinski [at] uconn [dot] edu

Sarah Ferrigno, former undergraduate research assistant. sarah [dot] k [dot] ferrigno [at] uconn [dot] edu