Salima Issina-Shorman

My PhD research investigates the incredible human capacity to solve coordination problems strategically. More specifically, it explores how we are able to efficiently identify and build on what is mutually manifest, and most importantly, to recruit that information for solving coordination tasks. This encompasses gaining a better understanding of underlying psychological mechanisms such as (1) metarepresentation at different levels of recursion, and (2) opportunistic implementation of joint experiences which occurred outside of formal coordination task structure. I argue that these social phenomena serve as the main drives in cultural evolution.