Jonathan Caballero Meneses

My research interests involve understanding the role that verbal and non-verbal cues play in the perception of social situations, personal traits, and affective inferences and how those perceptual processes influence social interaction and ultimately health outcomes and well-being in normal and disordered populations. An important characteristic of everyday interaction is its inherent ambiguity. However, failing to properly decode intentions and meanings in ambiguous situations leads to severe social interaction difficulties such as those observed in diverse clinical populations. Using a combination of perceptual, behavioral, and electrophysiological methodologies, my research aims to better understand how people resolve ambiguity in communication situations, and how they use those subtle cues to guide decisions in social interaction. I have applied this framework to the study of various subjects, including the influence of vocal emotions in guiding social interaction; the influence of nonstandard accents in guiding interpersonal trust and how the process can be modulated by concurrently expressing confidence using prosody; on the role that cognitive processes play in decoding social meanings and guiding social behavior in clinical populations (patients with Parkinson's Disease). Ongoing projects are analyzing the time course of processing prosodic distinctions using ERPs, and analyzing outcomes in social situations involving indirect meanings (insinuations) as spoken by native and nonnative speakers.