Seminar: Mindreading in Motion

Humans are natural mind-readers. Social cognition relies on our ability to mind-read others' behaviour—seeing their actions not just as motion, but as intentional acts, shaped by plans, desires, and beliefs. In many respects, mindreading is akin to reading print: just as written symbols encode meaning about the world, variations in behavior encode information about mental states. In her talk, Cristina will introduce kinematic coding, an experimental and computational framework developed in my lab to measure how mental state information is encoded and read out. She will discuss the potential of this approach for quantifying the social transmission of information in naturalistic behavior and its role in social inference. Finally, drawing from recent comparisons of human and AI performance in theory of mind tasks and social inference, Cristina will explore what Large Language Models (LLMs) can reveal about human mindreading.

Cristina Becchio is a Professor of Neuroscience at the University Medical Center Hamburg-EppendorfGermany. She originally studied philosophy at the University of Turin before shifting her research focus to cognitive science and neuroscience. Prior to joining Hamburg, she was a Full Professor at the University of Turin and a Senior Scientist at the Italian Institute of Technology. Her research explores the relationship between movement and cognition, investigating how mental state information is encoded and read out in movement. In this field, she was awarded an ERC Consolidator grant, followed up by an ERC Proof-of-Concept grant.

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