Keynotes

Mechanisms of human interactive behaviour and their application to virtual interactions

Antonia Hamilton is Professor of Social Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London. She completed a PhD on computational neuroscience at UCL (2002) and has since worked on autism, cognitive neuroscience, social behaviour and human brain imaging. Drawing on expertise in precision motion tracking and real-world behaviour, her lab aims to capture and understand the information processing mechanisms that support real-world social behaviour, enabling virtual humans to then show appropriate interactive behaviours. The research is inherently interdisciplinary, using methods from psychology, computing, engineering, theatre, child development and neuroscience to understand human social interaction.

Hamilton’s lab has been funded by the European Research Council, the Leverhulme Trust, the ESRC and others, and her contribution was recognised with the 2013 Experimental Psychology Society prize lectureship and a 2021 Lundbeck visiting Professor position at the University of Copenhagen. She has published over 150 papers and is the Editor in Chief of the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology and a fellow of the Association of Psychological Science.