How humans behave in the real world is fundamentally different from what is typically studied in the artificial laboratory settings. What are the patterns of behavior in the real world and how are they linked to the constrained laboratory measurements?
My laboratory leverages the rich data on human behavior from touchscreen smartphones to unravel the fundamental patterns underlying human actions. We rely on the high precision touchscreen recordings to quantify the activity in the real world.
I am interested in questions such as how is the brain wired to support our information gathering and sharing activities? Are the spontaneous actions differently controlled than the well-defined actions typically studied in the laboratory? How do we learn and retain the movements on the phone? And can we use the smartphone behavior to learn about how neurological diseases truly impact our day-to-day lives?
My research bridges basic neurophysiology, communication sciences, behavioral analysis and approaches borrowed from ecology and statistical physics.