Chris Frith

Profile

Although Chris retired from his position at the Wellcome Centre for Neuroimaging at UCL in 2007, he is  continuing with his studies of Interacting Minds. This discipline concerns the neural basis of social interaction. In particular, he has been trying to delineate the mechanisms underlying the human ability to share representations of the world, for it is this ability that makes communication possible and allows us to achieve more than we could as individuals. He is fortunate in having a number of excellent collaborators for this enterprise, in particular, Uta Frith. Initially his main experimental work on this topic was performed in the Interacting Minds Centre at Aarhus University, with Andreas Roepstorff, where new paradigms were developed for testing people in groups. In October 2011 He was elected a two-year fellow of All-Souls where he organised a series of seminars on meta-cognition to explore the critical role of this process in sharing experiences. Since 2014 his studies have been mostly conducted at the Institute of Philosophy where he is contrasting conscious and unconscious cognitive processes and exploring how instructions work. Chris is a Fellow of the Royal Society and of the British Academy. In 2014 Chris & Uta Frith were awarded the Jean Nicod prize for their work on social cognition.