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Psychology

Enda Tan

Picture of UVic Assistant professor Enda Tan

Assistant professor

Psychology

Accepting graduate students

Contact:
Office: COR A237
Credentials:
PhD (UBC)
Area(s) of expertise:
Lifespan health and development, Cognition and brain sciences, Child development, Neuroimaging, Social cognition
Related links:

Interests

  • Infancy and early childhood
  • Social perception and evaluation
  • Morality
  • Emotion
  • Brain development
  • Prediction error processing

Faculty bio

My research examines the mechanisms through which social understanding emerges and becomes increasingly sophisticated. I am particularly interested in how infants and young children use others’ emotions, actions, and social outcomes to infer hidden characteristics, form judgments, and revise those inferences when new information is ambiguous or surprising. By combining behavioural and cognitive neuroscience approaches, I investigate how these processes are linked to fundamental cognitive, emotional, and neural mechanisms.
 
A central focus of my work has been how children represent and evaluate social information, particularly violations of social and moral norms. Using electroencephalography (EEG), eye-tracking, and other physiological measures, I examine the neural and physiological mechanisms that support social perception and evaluation in the developing brain. I also use neural decoding methods to characterize how representations of social information emerge and change across development. In addition to examining the 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.
 
My long-term goal is to clarify the origins of social understanding and the mechanisms that scaffold complex thought and behaviour. At UVic, my current work examines how infants and young children use observable emotional and social cues to infer less visible aspects of others’ mental states, how surprise and violations of expectation support the revision of social evaluations, and how emerging social representations shape learning, affiliation, and decision-making.