Nicholas Duran

Nicholas Duran (PhD in Cognitive Psychology) is an associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is interested in the dynamic interplay between cognition, language, and action while individuals and groups engage in complex real-world tasks. He applies insights gleaned from this basic research program to build new computational tools and methods to help people become better communicators and better problem-solvers. He currently serves as the director of the "Cognition, Behavior, and Information" group (CBI: https://newcollege.asu.edu/cbi) at ASU and is a founding executive committee member of a multi-interdisciplinary consortium of data scientists at ASU (B2C2: https://newcollege.asu.edu/b2c2). The goals of both initiatives are well-aligned with Duran’s overall research agenda: to work across disciplinary boundaries to produce innovative research and to make data-driven discoveries. 

The specifics of his work revolve around behavioral dynamics and cognition as embedded and extended to complex environments. Be it in how people comprehend language, take another’s perspective to solve problems, or even in how they deceive, real insights can be had by examining cognition as expressed within patterns of behavior over time – and importantly – as a process that is deeply influenced by socially-rich and communicative contexts. In pursuing these lines of work, he uses a variety of laboratory-based and online experimental methods, and applies advanced computational modeling to support theory. Duran is an expert in collecting data that is multimodal, multi-feature, and temporally extended, sourced from the direct capture of motion, speech, physiology, and language, as well as collected from large-scale naturally-occurring datasets. To understand this data, he uses a range of novel techniques, including computer-mouse tracking, motion capture, computational linguistics, discourse modeling, acoustic analysis, physiological sensing, and nonlinear time series analyses. 

Please see http://dynamicog.org/projects/ for recent major projects.