Enda Tan
Assistant professor
Psychology
- Contact:
- Office: COR A237 endatan@uvic.ca
- Credentials:
- PhD (UBC)
- Area(s) of expertise:
- Lifespan health and development, cognition and brain sciences, neuroimaging, social cognition
- Related links:
Interests
- Infancy and early childhood
- Brain development
- Violations of expectation
- Social perception and evaluation
- Prosocial behavior
- Temperament and anxiety
Faculty bio
Human social understanding emerges remarkably early in life, yet its cognitive and neural foundations remain poorly understood. My research investigates how early-developing brain processes support the understanding of social and emotional cues, with the goal of clarifying the mechanistic foundations of social understanding in its earliest forms.
Specifically, my work examines how infants and young children detect, represent, and respond to social information, including violations of social and moral norms. Using neurophysiological methods such as electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), eye-tracking, pupillometry, electromyography, and electrodermal activity, I study how social experiences are encoded in the brain and linked to arousal, motivation, perception, evaluation, and learning. My research also employs decoding approaches to characterize neural representations of social information across development.
In addition to examining online processing of social information, my work investigates how early individual differences in brain activity and physiological responses relate to later cognitive, emotional, and social functioning. By studying infancy as a first draft of human cognition, my long-term goal is to illuminate the origins of social understanding and the developmental pathways that scaffold complex thought and behavior across the lifespan.