My most relevant current projects
If you are interested in any of these projects, feel free to reach out at: alexandrina.guran [at] medicalschool-hamburg . de (remove spaces)
Human Animal Perception
PI
Based on which characteristics of an animal do we decide to extend it our empathy, our care, or turn it into our dinner or our clothes? Mind Denial and cognitive dissonance may play a big role in how we perceive animals that we use for vastly different purposes, such as food procurement, companionship, or work. I am using behavior, EEG, Eyetracking and fMRI to understand which factors intrinsic to the animal, and which factors intrinsic to the observer, play together to explain how we put animals into different categories.
Dog´s perception of social interaction
Leading author in project (MRI-research). Selection of collaborators: Prof. Claus Lamm, Prof. Ludwig Huber, Dr. Christoph Völter, Dr. Magdalena Boch, Lucrezia Lonardo
The core project of my postdoctoral research revolves around the evolution of social cognition in humans and dogs. Within this project, I am running studies about social and non-social interaction perception, somatosensory perception, and observation of vicarious touch in others. Doing fMRI scanning with dogs is challenging, thus I have also worked on hardware improvements for the MRI scanning. For more information on our projects (and cute pictures of dogs in scanners), click the “CCNU” Tab at the top of this page.
Human attitudes towards canids
Collaboration partners: Prof. Dr. Friederike Range, PI Dr. Sarah Marshall-Pescini, Dr. Gwen Wirobski (Wolf Science Center).
In this project, I am responsible for designing explicit and implicit measures of attitudes towards dogs, wolves, and free-ranging dogs. To this end, we developed a questionnaire measuring sociodemographic data and attitudes. Additionally, I designed an adaptation of an IAT (implicit association test) to measure response-time based implicit biases for different animals.
Human-Nonhuman Social Interactions
PI
Never did our social lives include as much contact that does not take place face-to-face, or even with another human agent. How do we use AI in social interactions and how does it shape our sociality?
Other
- ManyDogs: If you want to join the project, or for more information, visit https://manydogsproject.github.io/
- Music4Autism: For more info, see my preprints or the project website at: https://www.m4a-project.net/
- A comprehensive model of retrieval practice and its neural bases (with Prof. Nico Bunzeck, University of Lübeck)
- Connective Field Modeling in canines (with Dr. Nicholas Hedger, University of Reading)
- Somatosensory perception and temperament in domestic pigs (co-author, leads: Dr. Charlotte Goursot, Dr. Oceane Schmitt, Dr. Jean-Loup Rault, Veterinary Medical University Vienna, and Dr. David Val-Laillet, INRAE, Université de Rennes and his team)
- Multimodal perception of musical chords in professional and lay musicians (with Prof. Lars Kuchinke, International Psychoanalytic University Berlin)
Feel free to contact me for questions or collaboration requests!