Gergely Csibra

Gergely Csibra is a part-time Professor of Psychology at Birkbeck, University of London, with a primary affiliation at Central European University in Budapest. His research focuses on developmental psychology, cognitive science, and neuroscience, particularly exploring infant social cognition, action perception, and neuroimaging techniques. He investigates how infants interpret social interactions, understand goal-directed actions, and process communicative signals through methodologies such as ERP, fNIRS, and eye-tracking.

Research Interests:

• Infant social cognition and theory of mind
• Development of social learning mechanisms
• Neural basis of action understanding
• Language acquisition and symbolic representation
• Joint action and collaborative cognition
• Developmental neuroscience using EEG/fNIRS

Publications: Over 160 peer-reviewed articles, including foundational work on natural pedagogy, teleological reasoning in infancy, and social cognitive development. Recent work examines social cost optimization in collaborative actions and the neural correlates of infant communication understanding.

Labs/Teams: Leads interdisciplinary research groups studying cognitive development at both Birkbeck and CEU, collaborating with neuroscientists, psychologists, and robotics researchers to model human social cognition.