Interpersonal Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

We use stories and movies to understand how the brain makes sense of ourselves, our friends, and the things we desire...

Research Overview

The Wagner Lab is located in the Department of Psychology at The Ohio State University. Research in the lab is primarily focused on investigating the brain basis of how humans take disparate facts and observations about other persons and weave these into the complex and multidimensional character portraits that form the basis of our person knowledge. A seperate topic of research focuses on examining the behavioral and neural mechanisms of self-regulation and its failure.

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News

May 2024 The lab's research was featured in a documentary about AI relationships: Jenke. Experiment Liebe TV Episode

July 2024 Scientific American interviewed Dr. Wagner about the lab's research on parasocial relationships. Interview

September 2023 Tim Broom published a new paper in a Cerebral Cortex on how loneliness impacts the representation of real and fictional others. PDF Press Release

September 2022 Welcome to Huanqing Wang, Eunjee Ko & Dan Zhu, all new graduate students in the lab!

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