What does it take to navigate in complex social environments? How do we perceive, evaluate, and predict the actions of others, and how does this feed into decision-making in the social domain? These are the guiding questions underlying the research activities of the ScienceCampus.

The processing of information and coordination of responses to social inputs can only be understood by combining evolutionary, developmental, neuroscientific and theoretical perspectives. As such, these questions cannot be answered by one individual research group, or even one department, but require pan-institutional connectivity that can leverage complementary expertise to tackle the big questions at the heart of social cognition. We bring together psychologists, behavioural and cognitive biologists as well as system, computational and clinical neuroscientists from the German Primate Center and the University of Göttingen. We study the social behaviour and neural foundations of information processing and decision-making in social settings in nonhuman primates in the wild and in the lab, and in humans of different ages. We investigate individual behaviour in non-social settings, dyadic interactions, small multi-player groups and in complex groups with different social strata. Computational and theoretical approaches are an integral part of the develop-ment of novel models that account for the dynamics of social interactions at different levels of complexity.