Prof. David Rudrauf, Ph.D.

Research

My research aims at better understanding consciousness, the relationships between perception, emotion, imagination, social cognition and action programming, through the modeling of spatial cognition and its role in information integration and the control of behavior.

I develop with my group the Projective Consciousness Model (PCM), which we implement in artificial agents combined with VR, to study the mechanisms of exploratory and exploitation behaviors, social interactions, and communication.

The approach is interdisciplinary and combines mathematical modeling, implementation of artificial agents to simulate social and non-social behaviors, and experimental research based on virtual reality and robotics to test model predictions.

Basic research: we are particularly interested in the action of geometric groups on the processing of spatial information in connection with motor imagery, and in its structuring role in the evaluation of the epistemic (curiosity) and utility (reinforcement) value of actions.

Applied research: we seeks to develop: 1) model-based psychometric solutions, to assess and train performance in navigation tasks involving ambiguous situations and capacities for social inference or “soft skills”, in virtual reality; 2) human-machine interfaces and social robotics solutions inspired by human cognition and consciousness to improve human-machine interactions.