Conference Programme

The Co-Align Conference 2023 will be held on 16 May 2023 at Leiden University.

We are delighted to announce our keynote speakers:

• Antonia Hamilton (University College London)
• Leonhard Schilbach (LVR Hospital Düsseldorf / Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)
• Victoria Leong (University of Cambridge / Nanyang Technological University Singapore)

The conference will take place in-person at the Factulty of Social and Behavioural Sciences at Leiden University. Key note lectures and flash talks during the day will be followed by a poster session in the afternoon. 

The full day program can be found here.

Keynote Abstracts

Antonia Hamilton: Synchrony in the brain and the real world

People often synchronise during spontaneous interactions and this may be related to social bonding or social coordination.  This talk will review research on neural mechanisms of interpersonal synchrony, presenting a mutual prediction model which has the potential to account for a wide range of findings.  In particular, fNIRS studies show that people engaged in a face-to-face task show coordinated brain activation patterns which are consistent with the mutual prediction model.  Building on the insight that mutual prediction depends on motoric social interactions, the second part of the talk will consider how interaction can best be measured in real-world contexts outside the lab.  Using wearable sensors, we have collected motion data from autistic and neurotypical children in their classrooms to quantify their engagement with teachers and with each other.  These methods have promise for taking synchrony research out of the lab and into the real world.

Leonhard Schilbach 

Social neuroscience studies the neurobiology of how people make sense of people. Due to conceptual and methodological limitations, the field has only more recently begun to study social interaction rather than social observation, which has become known as the development of a "second-person neuroscience" or an "interactive turn" in social neuroscience. These developments have helped to elucidate the behavioural and neural mechanisms of social interactions. Findings to date suggest that the neural mechanisms supporting social interaction differ from those involved in social observation and highlight a role of the so- called ‘mentalizing network’ as important in this distinction. Taking social interaction seriously may also be particularly important for the advancement of the scientific study of different psychiatric conditions, which are ubiquitously characterized by social impairments.

Victoria Leong

Victoria Leong is a developmental cognitive neuroscientist who has pioneered the use of dyadic-EEG to study parent-infant neural synchrony during naturalistic social interactions. Vicky is Associate Professor of Psychology and Medicine at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore), Senior Honorary Fellow at the Department of Pediatrics, Cambridge University (UK), and Deputy Director of the Cambridge-NTU Centre for Lifelong Individualised Learning which aims to develop neuropersonalised training programes for flexible learning across the lifespan.