Richard Ramsey

• PhD
• Senior Scientist at ETH Zurich

According to aesthetic cognitivism theory, art represents a source of knowledge that promotes understanding, creativity and thinking. However, it remains unclear exactly what kind of art knowledge shapes understanding and thinking. Given the important role played by the arts in acquiring knowledge and facilitating learning and understanding of huma...

The study of how we develop art knowledge can provide valuable insights into the underlying cognitive systems that support expertise and knowledge transfer to new contexts. An important and largely unanswered question is whether art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive functions. Across three pre-registered exp...

Based on the seminal minimal group experiment, the widely influential social identity theory has, in the last 45 y, led to the belief that discrimination follows from intergroup relations and social identity. A large body of research evidenced that people discriminate against members of their out versus ingroup, even if groups and identities were a...

Evidence accumulation modelling has been shown to uncover new insights into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie decision making from behavioural data. By jointly modelling reaction time and accuracy data, such decision models estimate latent variables that represent distinct computaitonal processes, such as stimulus encoding, response caution an...

Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence reshapes visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, critical questions arise about the moral and aesthetic implications of AI-generated art. Despite the growing use of...

Time-to-event data such as response times and saccade latencies form a cornerstone of experimental psychology, and have had a widespread impact on our understanding of human cognition. However, the orthodox method for analyzing such data - comparing means between conditions - is known to conceal valuable information about the timeline of psychologi...

Evidence accumulation modelling has been shown to uncover new insights into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie decision making from behavioural data. By jointly modelling reaction time and accuracy data, such decision models estimate latent variables that represent distinct computaitonal processes, such as stimulus encoding, response caution an...

Evidence accumulation modelling has been shown to uncover new insights into the cognitive mechanisms that underlie decision making from behavioural data. By jointly modelling reaction time and accuracy data, such decision models estimate latent variables that represent distinct computaitonal processes, such as stimulus encoding, response caution an...

Although discrimination is typically believed to occur from well-defined categories like ethnicity, disability, and sex, studies have found that discrimination persists in minimal conditions lacking such categories. Participants have been found to preferentially allocate resources based on seemingly arbitrary shared characteristics such as dot esti...

The shape and texture of humans and humanoid robots provide perceptual information that help us to appropriately categorise these stimuli. However, it remains unclear which features and attributes are driving the assignment into human and non-human categories. To explore this issue, we ran a series of five preregistered experiments wherein we prese...

The automatic copying of other people—automatic imitation—is one of the most widely studied topics in psychology. In this chapter, we review current evidence for the neurophysiological correlates of automatic imitation. To do so, we focus on one heavily used and influential paradigm that manipulates stimulus-response compatibility and is conducive...

Although discrimination is typically believed to occur from well-defined categories like ethnicity, disability, and sex, studies have found that discrimination persists in minimal conditions lacking such categories. Participants have been found to preferentially allocate resources based on seemingly arbitrary shared characteristics such as dot esti...

In recent years, the use of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) has proliferated across various domains, ranging from advertising and social media to the generation of artwork for presentation at esteemed art exhibitions and for sale on the art auction market. Despite its growing prevalence, empirical data show that people maintain a clear bia...

Throughout history, art creation has been regarded as a uniquely human means to express original ideas, emotions, and experiences. However, as Generative Artificial Intelligence reshapes visual, aesthetic, legal, and economic culture, critical questions arise about the moral and aesthetic implications of AI-generated art. Despite the growing use of...

Objective Loneliness, when prolonged, is associated with many deleterious effects and has been shown to be highly prevalent in those with a history of stroke, yet the cognitive mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon remain unclear. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the extent to which cognitive factors, with specific focus on proces...

The seminal minimal group experiment has shown that discrimination can follow from intergroup relations and social identity. A large body of research evidenced that people discriminate against members of their out versus ingroup, even if groups and identities were assigned on the basis of one’s dot guessing style, aesthetic judgement or a chance ou...

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain‐general processes for controlling cognition has been historically undervalued in social cognition and social neuroscience research. We suggest much of social cognition can...

According to aesthetic cognitivism theory, art represents a source of knowledge that promotes understanding, creativity and thinking. However, it remains unclear exactly what kind of art knowledge shapes understanding and thinking. Given the important role played by the arts in acquiring knowledge and facilitating learning and understanding of huma...

According to aesthetic cognitivism theory, art represents a source of knowledge that promotes understanding, creativity and thinking. However, it remains unclear exactly what kind of art knowledge shapes understanding and thinking. Given the important role played by the arts in acquiring knowledge and facilitating learning and understanding of huma...

Objective Loneliness, when prolonged, is associated with many deleterious effects and has been shown to be highly prevalent in those with a history of stroke, yet the cognitive mechanisms underpinning this phenomenon remain unclear. Therefore, the current study aims to investigate the extent to which cognitive factors, with specific focus on proces...

Social cognition differs from general cognition in its focus on understanding, perceiving, and interpreting social information. However, we argue that the significance of domain-general processes for controlling cognition have been historically undervalued in social neuroscience and social cognition research. We suggest much of social cognition can...

The study of how we develop art knowledge can provide valuable insight into the structure of underlying cognitive systems that support art expertise and knowledge transfer to new contexts. An important question that is left largely unanswered is the extent to which art knowledge training impacts subsequent judgements of artworks and executive funct...

Evidence accumulation models are a series of computational models that provide an account for speeded decision making. These models have been used extensively within the cognitive psychology literature to great success, allowing inferences to be drawn about the psychological processes that underlie cognition that are sometimes not available in a tr...

Eye gaze plays dual perceptual and social roles in everyday life. Gaze allows us to select information, while also indicating to others where we are attending. There are situations, however, where revealing the locus of our attention is not adaptive, such as when playing competitive sports or confronting an aggressor. It is in these circumstances t...

Loneliness is associated with detrimental consequences for mental and physical health. Even though loneliness affects people of all ages, very few studies have examined its prevalence across the adult lifespan. Additionally, no study has examined the distinction between social and emotional loneliness across the lifespan, even though it has long be...

Evidence accumulation models are a series of computational models that provide an accountfor speeded decision making. These models have been used extensively within the cognitive psychology literature to great success, allowing inferences to be drawn about the psychological processes that underlie cognition that are sometimes not available in a tra...

Eye gaze plays dual perceptual and social roles in everyday life. Gaze allows us to select information for further processing, whilst also indicating to others where we are attending. There are situations, however, where revealing the locus of our attention to others is not adaptive, such as when playing competitive sport or confronting an aggresso...

Many aspects of social cognition and behaviour have been argued to rely on automatic mechanisms. Whilst there has been an increased interest in body perception research in recent years, little is known about how automatically the processing of body shapes is linked to other social processes, such as trait inferences. In two pre-registered experimen...

The experience of loneliness is highly prevalent in the acquired brain injury population. However, there is currently little information regarding the role that cognitive, emotional and behavioural impairments may play in the generation and maintenance of persistent loneliness. The primary objective of this position paper is to introduce the reader...

Given that aesthetic experiences typically involve extracting meaning from environment, we believe that semantic cognition research has much to offer the field of neuroaesthetics. In the current paper, we propose a generalised framework that is inspired by the semantic cognition literature and that treats aesthetic experience as just one example of...

Loneliness is associated with detrimental consequences for mental and physical health. Even though loneliness affects people of all ages, very few studies have examined its prevalence across the adult lifespan. Additionally, no study has examined the distinction between social and emotional loneliness across the lifespan, even though it has long be...

Aesthetic judgments dominate much of daily life by guiding how we evaluate objects, people, and experiences in our environment. One key question that remains unanswered is the extent to which more specialised or largely general cognitive resources support aesthetic judgments. To investigate this question in the context of working memory, we examine...

Aesthetic judgments dominate much of daily life by guiding how we evaluate objects, people, and experiences in our environment. One key question that remains unanswered is the extent to which more specialised or largely general cognitive resources support aesthetic judgments. To investigate this question in the context of executive resources, we ex...

Research in social cognition has predominantly investigated perceptual and inferential processes separately, however real-world social interactions usually involve integration between person inferences (e.g., generous, selfish) and the perception of physical appearance (e.g., thin, tall). Therefore, in the current work, we investigated the integrat...

Although there is growing interest in the neural foundations of aesthetic experience, it remains unclear how particular mental sub‐systems (e.g., perceptual, affective, cognitive) are involved in different types of aesthetic judgments. Here we use fMRI to investigate the involvement of different neural networks during aesthetic judgments of visual...

The process of understanding the minds of other people, such as their emotions and intentions, is mimicked when individuals try to understand an artificial mind. The assumption is that anthropomorphism, attributing human-like characteristics to non-human agents and objects, is an analogue to theory-of-mind, the ability to infer mental states of oth...

Objective Despite clinical observation that stroke survivors frequently experience loneliness, there is no large-scale empirical evidence to support this observation. Therefore, the primary objective of this research was to provide the first large-scale and comprehensive estimate of loneliness in the stroke survivor population. Method To address t...

Exaggerated claims and low levels of reproducibility are commonplace in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, due to an incentive structure that demands “newsworthy” results. My overall argument here is that in addition to methodological reform, greater modesty is required across all levels - from individual researchers to the systems that govern...

Although there is growing interest in the neural foundations of aesthetic experience, it remains unclear how particular mental sub-systems (e.g., perceptual, affective, cognitive) are involved in different types of aesthetic judgments. Here we use fMRI to investigate the involvement of different neural networks during aesthetic judgments of visual...

The mirror neuron system has dominated understanding of observational learning from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Our review highlights the value of observational learning frameworks that integrate a more diverse and distributed set of cognitive and brain systems, including those implicated in sensorimotor transformations, as well as in mor...

A variety of subtle social cues, including gaze behaviour, are used to form impressions of others. For example, if another’s eye-gaze reliably helps or hinders us while we complete a task, we incidentally form a positive or negative impression about them. In real life, people are rarely so consistent in their behaviour, and they are often encounter...

To date, neuroaesthetics research has primarily framed aesthetic experiences as a special case of cognition. In the current paper, we argue that the dominance of this specialised approach needs rethinking. Instead, we propose a generalised framework that is inspired by the semantic cognition literature and that treats aesthetic experience as just o...

The process of understanding the minds of other people, such as their emotions and intentions, is mimicked when individuals try to understand an artificial mind. The assumption is that anthropomorphism, attributing human-like characteristics to non-human agents and objects, is an analogue to Theory-of-Mind, the ability to infer mental states of oth...

As robots advance from the pages and screens of science fiction into our homes, hospitals, and schools, they are poised to take on increasingly social roles. Consequently, the need to understand the mechanisms supporting human–machine interactions is becoming increasingly pressing. We introduce a framework for studying the cognitive and brain mecha...

Studying social modulation of cognitive processes holds much promise for illuminating how, where, when and why social factors influence how we perceive and act in the world, as well as providing insight into the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This is no small objective; it reflects an ambitious programme of research. At present, based on the moda...

Despite clinical observation that stroke survivors frequently experience loneliness, there is no large-scale empirical evidence to support this observation. To address this issue, we completed two pre-registered analyses of a nationally representative annual survey that included a self-report measure of loneliness (N>21000). Across two separate coh...

Whether on a first date or during a team briefing at work, people’s daily lives are inundated with social information, and in recent years, researchers have begun studying the neural mechanisms that support social-information processing. We argue that the focus of social neuroscience research to date has been skewed toward specialized processes at...

Research in social cognition has predominantly investigated perceptual and inferential processes separately, whilst real-world social interactions usually require integration between person inferences (e.g., generous, selfish) and the perception of physical appearance (e.g., thin, tall). Therefore, in the current work, we investigated the integrati...

Cognitive control refers to the ability of human beings to adapt flexibly and quickly to continuously changing environments. Several decades of research have identified a diverse range of mental processes that are associated with cognitive control but the extent to which shared systems underlie cognitive control in social and non-social contexts, a...

Exaggerated claims and low levels of reproducibility are commonplace in psychology and cognitive neuroscience, due to an incentive structure that demands “newsworthy” results. My overall argument here is that in addition to methodological reform, greater modesty is required across all levels - from individual researchers to the systems that govern...

Studying social modulation of cognitive processes holds much promise for illuminating how, where, when and why social factors influence how we perceive and act in the world, as well as providing insight into the underlying cognitive mechanisms. This is no small objective; it reflects an ambitious programme of research. At present, based on the moda...

Research in social neuroscience has primarily focused on carving up cognition into distinct pieces, as a function of mental process, neural network or social behaviour, while the need for unifying models that span multiple social phenomena has been relatively neglected. Here we present a novel framework that treats social cognition as a case of sem...

The credibility of psychological science has been questioned recently, due to low levels of reproducibility and the routine use of inadequate research practices (Chambers, 2017; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). In response, wide-ranging reform to scientific practice has been proposed (e.g., Munafò et al., 2017)...

Whether on a first-date or during a team briefing at work, our daily lives are inundated with social information and in recent years research has begun studying the neural mechanisms that support social information processing. We argue that the focus of social neuroscience research to date has been skewed towards specialised processes at the expens...

Cognitive control refers to the ability of human beings to adapt flexibly and quickly to continuously changing environments. Several decades of research have identified a diverse range of mental processes that are associated with cognitive control but the extent to which shared systems underlie cognitive control in social and non-social contexts, a...

Humans have a remarkable ability to learn by watching others, whether learning to tie an elaborate knot or play the piano. However, the mechanisms that translate visual input into motor skill execution remain unclear. It has been proposed that common cognitive and neural mechanisms underpin learning motor skills by physical and observational practi...

Automaticity has been argued to be a core feature of the mental processes that guide social interactions, such as those underpinning imitative behaviors. To date, however, there is little known about the automaticity of imitative tendencies. In the current study, we used a finger movement stimulus-response compatibility task to index processes asso...

Humans copy other people without their conscious awareness, a behaviour known as automatic imitation. Although automatic imitation forms a key part of daily social interactions, we do not copy other people indiscriminately. Instead, we control imitative tendencies by prioritising some actions and inhibiting others. To date, neuroimaging studies inv...

Research in social neuroscience has primarily focused on carving up cognition into distinct pieces, as a function of mental process, neural network or social behaviour, while the need for unifying models that span multiple social phenomena has been relatively neglected. Here we present a novel framework that treats social cognition as a case of sem...

Imitation and perspective taking are core features of non-verbal social interactions. We imitate one another to signal a desire to affiliate and consider others’ points of view to better understand their perspective. Prior research suggests that a relationship exists between prosocial behaviour and imitation. For example, priming prosocial behaviou...

Learning new skills by watching others is important for social and motor development throughout the lifespan. Prior research has suggested that observational learning shares common substrates with physical practice at both cognitive and brain levels. In addition, neuroimaging studies have used multivariate analysis techniques to understand neural r...

The perception of other people is instrumental in guiding social interactions. For example, the appearance of the human body cues a wide range of inferences regarding sex, age, health, and personality, as well as emotional state and intentions, which influence social behavior. To date, most neuroscience research on body perception has aimed to char...

Humans have a remarkable ability to learn by watching others, whether learning to tie an elaborate knot or play the piano. However, the mechanisms that translate visual input into motor skill execution remain unclear. It has been proposed that common cognitive and neural mechanisms underpin learning motor skills by physical and observational practi...

Automaticity has been argued to be a core feature of the mental processes that guide social interactions, such as those underpinning imitative behaviours. To date, however, there is little known about the automaticity of imitative tendencies. In the current study, we used a finger movement stimulus-response compatibility task to index processes ass...

When learning a new motor skill, we benefit from watching others. It has been suggested that observation of others' actions can build a motor representation in the observer, and as such, physical and observational learning might share a similar neural basis. If physical and observational learning share a similar neural basis, then motor cortex stim...

The human face cues a wealth of social information, but the neural mechanisms that underpin social attributions from faces are not well known. In the current fMRI experiment, we used repetition suppression to test the hypothesis that populations of neurons in face perception and theory-of-mind neural networks would show sensitivity to faces that cu...

Statements used in the pilot experiment. Note: For items with a number 1 in the reverse score column, subjects’ scores were reversed so that a high score represents high trait representation. (DOCX)

Pilot experiment to evaluate stimuli. (DOCX)

Exploratory analysis of wider face perception and theory of mind networks. Abbreviations: ROI = Region of interest; fdr = false discovery rate; OFA = occipital face area; FFA = right fusiform face area; pSTS = posterior superior temporal sulcus; TPJ = temporoparietal junction; mPFC = medial prefrontal cortex; ant. Temp. = anterior temporal; MTG = m...

Face rating data for the behavioural pilot experiment. Face judgment data in a two-alternative forced-choice task (A) and a ratings task (B). The black line at 50% in (A) represents chance performance. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals. One-tailed confidence intervals are displayed in (A) to reflect the one-tailed hypothesis in each compariso...

Average self-reported trait scores. Average self-reported trait scores for individuals included in the high and low composites, as well as individuals before transformation. As should be the case, average scores are different for individuals included in the high and low composites (no overlap of 95%CIs, in square brackets). In addition, average sco...

Results from the two-alternative forced-choice task (2AFC) and the ratings task. Square brackets = 95% Confidence intervals. (DOCX)

Methodology for the behavioural pilot experiment. Note: The images used are for illustrative purposes and were not used in the pilot experiment. (TIFF)

Learning new skills by watching others is important for social and motor development throughout the lifespan. Prior research has suggested that observational learning shares common substrates with physical practice at both cognitive and brain levels. In addition, neuroimaging studies have used multivariate analysis techniques to understand neural r...

The human face cues a wealth of social information, but the neural mechanisms that underpin social attributions from faces are not well known. In the current fMRI experiment, we used repetition suppression to test the hypothesis that populations of neurons in face perception and theory-of-mind neural networks would show sensitivity to faces that cu...

Humans show an involuntary tendency to copy other people's actions. Although automatic imitation builds rapport and affiliation between individuals, we do not copy actions indiscriminately. Instead, copying behaviors are guided by a selection mechanism, which inhibits some actions and prioritizes others. To date, the neural underpinnings of the inh...

Humans copy other people without their conscious awareness, a behaviour known as automatic imitation. Although automatic imitation forms a key part of daily social interactions, we do not copy other people indiscriminately. Instead, we control imitative tendencies by prioritising some actions and inhibiting others. To date, neuroimaging studies inv...

Imitation and perspective taking are core features of non-verbal social interactions. We imitate one another to signal a desire to affiliate and consider others' points of view to better understand their perspective. Prior research suggests that a relationship exists between prosocial behaviour and imitation. For example, priming prosocial behaviou...

When learning a new motor skill, we benefit from watching others. It has been suggested that observation of others’ actions can build a motor representation in the observer, and as such, physical and observational learning might share a similar neural basis. If physical and observational learning share a similar neural basis, then motor cortex stim...

The Supplementary Materials (videos) illustrate one example trial of an observational learning video stimulus.

Supplementary Materials 1 contains full results excluding the nine participants for whom TMS localisation of M1 was not possible. These supplementary materials contain a table of the observational practice effects and tDCS effects on sequence-specific learning, as well as a figure visualising all performance results excluding these nine participant...

Body shape cues inferences regarding personality and health, but the neural processes underpinning such inferences remain poorly understood. Across two fMRI experiments, we test the extent to which neural networks associated with body perception and theory-of-mind (ToM) support social inferences based on body shape. Participants observed obese, mus...

Body shape cues inferences regarding personality and health, but the neural processes underpinning such inferences remain poorly understood. Across two fMRI experiments, we test the extent to which neural networks associated with body perception and theory-of-mind (ToM) support social inferences based on body shape. Participants observed obese, mus...

Although humans show an involuntary tendency to copy other people’s actions, which builds rapport between individuals, we do not copy actions indiscriminately. Instead, copying behaviours are guided by a selection mechanism, which inhibits some actions and prioritises others. To date, the neural underpinnings of the inhibition of automatic imitatio...

Group biases guide social interactions by promoting in-group favouritism, but the neural mechanisms underpinning group biases remain unclear. While neuroscience research has shown that distributed brain circuits are associated with seeing in-group and out-group members as "us" and "them", it is less clear how these networks exchange signals. This f...

The majority of human neuroscience research has focussed on understanding functional organisation within segregated patches of cortex. The ventral visual stream has been associated with the detection of physical features such as faces and body parts, whereas the theory-of-mind network has been associated with making inferences about mental states a...

Imitation and facial signals are fundamental social cues that guide interactions with others, but little is known regarding the relationship between these behaviors. It is clear that during expression detection, we imitate observed expressions by engaging similar facial muscles. It is proposed that a cognitive system, which matches observed and per...

Neuroscience research has examined separately how we detect human agents on the basis of their face and body (person perception) and how we reason about their thoughts, traits or intentions (person knowledge). Neuroanatomically distinct networks have been associated with person perception and person knowledge, but it remains unknown how multiple fe...