Through their work in IUPUC’s Social Neuroscience Lab, professors Mark Jaime, Ph.D., and Liz daSilva, Ph.D., are conducting research to better understand how humans use movement to convey emotion and how one's ability to move—or lack thereof—affects how neurodiverse people are perceived.

Jaime said much of the lab's research is focused on children with autism. These children often have difficulty making controlled movements, which may impact their ability to both communicate and process social information through movement.

"We're interested in how someone perceives movements from atypical populations like children with autism," Jaime said. "If we are expecting certain movements to give us certain social and emotional cues, maybe children with autism can't express that because it's a movement they can't do."

The important reasearch that the Social Neuroscience Lab is conducting was recently profiled on News at IU.

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