ABOUT ME

Hi, I am Tatia, a cognitive neuroscientist interested in how the brain enables us to make sense of other’s minds. More specifically, I am studying how our minds generate and interpret signals about others’ mental states in everyday interactions, especially when those signals become the main medium of communication. Through computational models, I try to decode the mental and neural mechanisms that drive these kinds of social decisions.

During my PhD at the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, I explored how expectation violations can serve as communicative signals, essentially, how surprising actions help us align with others when we are figuring out intentions on the fly. In a follow-up study, I compared this mechanism to more traditional Theory of Mind models, where one tries to simulate another person’s thinking. These projects combined behavioural experiments, model-based EEG analysis, cognitive modelling, and agent-based human-computer interactions.

More recently, I have become especially interested in adolescence as a period of change in perspective-taking abilities, how young people gradually shift from egocentric reasoning to more mature, recursive thinking. It is a time when communication strategies and social cognition are still under construction, and I find it very exciting to study how those mechanisms evolve.

While my core focus is on social cognition, I am always open to learning from other directions. I love collaborating across disciplines and often find that fresh insights often come from the edges where fields overlap.

Outside the lab, I am passionate about street and analogue photography, urban exploration, and graphic design.

Here is my Google Scholar profile, and I am also active in LinkedIn, Research gate and Bluesky.