Mikolaj Hernik
Mikolaj Hernik, førsteamanuensis, UiT Norges artiske universitet
Hovedinnhold
- Infant perception and cognition
- Representation of agents, actions, goals, tools and functions
- Early communication
- Development of color vision
Research interests: Human infants from early on in development show remarkable skills in interpreting other agents and their actions. I investigate some of these basic and early emerging social-cognitive skills. My studies looked at e.g.:
- Infants’ ability to attribute goals to actions of novel non-human agents.
- Infants’ expectation of efficiency in such actions.
- Learning the functions of novel tools by encoding the goals of tool-using actions.
- Representing directionality of novel agents in relation to their actions.
- Sensitivity to basic communicative signals, like gaze-direction, infant directed speech, eye-brow raise.
I am particularly interested in perceptual and cognitive mechanisms that might belong to the evolutionary ancient toolkit supporting responses to agents and actions in cognitive systems across the animal kingdom. For this reason I collaborate in studies testing predictions about universality of some infant social-cognitive skills across human cultures, and about the presence of some related or rudimentary skills in non-human animals. Another closely related research topic comes from the idea that such basic building blocks of our social perception and cognition might have shaped evolution of human culture by acting as “cognitive attractors”. I study this question by investigating phenomena such as “forward bias” in graphic depictions of agents in historical works of art.
Three years ago I moved to Tromsø, located above the Arctic circle. Since then, I became very interested in whether the seasonal changes in the spectral characteristics of the ambient light, which we experience at this high latitude, may exert detectable effects on colour perception. Furthermore, whether the accommodation of colour vision to the prevailing spectral conditions during the first months of life can have lasting effects detectable across populations of infants, who develop typical colour vision, but were born above the Arctic circle during different seasons of the year. I pursue these questions currently in collaboration with Anna Franklin (University of Sussex) and Bruno Laeng (University of Oslo).
Contact information:
Email: mikolaj.l.hernik@uit.no
Website: https://uit.no/ansatte/mikolaj.l.hernik
