Alexia Galati, PhD

Research Interests:

Perspective-taking is ubiquitous in everyday life: in many situations people must consider perspectives distinct from our own, including others’ emotions, perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs. Yet this fundamental cognitive skill is subject to many underexplored constraints. Dr. Galati is a behavioral scientist who examines the adaptive behavior of humans as they interact with their environment and with social others. Her research program examines how people keep track of each other’s perspective in conversation, how they adapt their language and behavior to coordinate when working together, and how successful that coordination ultimately is. Dr. Galati uses an array of methods, including behavioral experiments, eye-tracking, mouse-tracking, web-based crowdsourcing, quantitative discourse analysis, virtual reality and augmented reality technology, and computational modeling.
In the context of health behaviors, Dr. Galati is interested in how perspective-taking and related constructs (e.g., empathy) are related to health behavior changes. She is especially interested in the interplay of these constructs in communicative contexts (e.g., the interactions between patients and professionals in the health care system), where misalignment in goals and shared understanding can occur. She is also interested in using gamification and virtual reality (VR) technology to develop interventions for health behavior change.