Mauricio Martins, MD PhD

My broad research topic is the investigation of the mechanisms, evolution, and social functions of hierarchical cognition. During most of my career, I worked as a cognitive scientist and studied the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the representation of hierarchical structures. Since 2019, I have also been working as a Historical Psychologist, using computational social science tools to assess the relationship between psychological change, socioeconomic trends, and political events.

Priorities

1. Map the cognitive and neural bases of the human capacity to generate complex hierarchies.
2. Study the dynamics of social systems as a product of people’s preferences, values, and cognitive constraints.
3. Test how stress impacts information-processing bottlenecks and how this leads to adverse social outcomes.
4. Build computational models of epistemic trust.