My major research interest is currently on social neuroscience, or the neurological underpinning of social cognition, in particular on person impression formation involving traits and goals. I am especially interested in spontaneous social inferences, and explore the question of whether earlier social neuroscience findings in which participants make such inferences explicitly, generalize to the case where these inferences are made implicitly.

This social neuroscience interest follows from my earlier research on connectionist models of important domains in social cognition: causal attribution, group biases, person impression formation and attitude formation and change (including cognitive dissonance). I conducted simulations on representative findings from the literature in these domains in order to develop a general and unified process model of these judgments in social cognition.

During the previous ten years, I worked on several issues in the domain of causal and dispositional attributions. My earlier interests focused on attribution retraining programs with the aid of covariation information manipulation and the emotional and cognitive consequences of causal attributions in the achievement domain. Next, I moved to the question of how people make use of covariation information in order to make causal and dispositional inferences.