Joint action coordination relies on the dynamic alignment of cognitive and neural processes between individuals. Recent research in social neuroscience suggests that interbrain synchrony—temporal alignment of neural oscillations across brains—supports such coordination by enhancing shared attention, prediction, and motor coupling.
Joint action coordination is a part of research agenda of The HiPerCog group led by Prof. Ben Cowley. To move beyond correlational evidence, one of the HiPerCog studies introduces a dual-transcranial alternating current stimulation (dual-tACS) protocol designed to causally modulate interbrain synchrony during joint tasks. By inducing phase-aligned oscillations in the alpha and beta frequency bands between two participants, the approach aims to test how externally driven synchrony influences behavioral coordination in real time.
The experimental design combines two paradigms: a rhythmic finger-tapping task that probes sensorimotor coupling, and a joint steering task that requires continuous co-regulation of movement. Together, these methods enable systematic investigation of how frequency-specific interbrain phase alignment contributes to the neural basis of coordinated action.
Ylätalo, H., Rodionov, A., Kilpeläinen, S., Möttönen, R., & Cowley, B. U. (2025, January 6). A Dual-tACS Study Protocol to Investigate Online Effects of Induced Interbrain Alpha and Beta Synchrony on Joint Action Coordination.
Benjamin Ultan Cowley is Professor of Learning in Humans and Machines at the Faculty of Educational Sciences, and a Docent of cognitive science. He defended his PhD in Computer Science at the University of Ulster, Northern Ireland, in 2009, and has led his group HiPerCog since 2019. The HiPerCog group studies how people learn to perform highly-demanding dynamic cognitive tasks, using computational cognitive neuroscience methods.
Andrei Rodionov is a brain researcher currently working at the intersection of neuroscience, cognitive science, and learning. He obtained his PhD in Medicine from the University of Helsinki in 2020 and he completed his postdoctoral research at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Harvard Medical School in 2023. In his studies, he uses neurocognitive, electrophysiological, neuroimaging and brain stimulation methods. He has contributed to a range of clinical and basic research fields including spinal cord injury, delirium, neuroplasticity, emotion, attention, and creativity.
Hanna Ylätalo is doctoral researcher whose project aims to elucidate the role of neural synchrony in collaborative learning through causal experimental manipulation using transcranial alternating current stimulation. She has a Master’s degree in cognitive science, with a thesis on Empathy and EDA synchrony in VR collaboration, and a rich study history from diverse fields, e.g., statistics, molecular biology, experimental psychology, human-computer interaction and group processes. Hanna believes think that science at its best adopts theories from related fields to provide reliable, holistic descriptions of the world.
Science stereotypes rely on presumptions of anthropocentrism and certainty. The AI tools in research are not just a black-box, semi-secretly used. Generative artificial intelligence can also have positive impact on research. Their intelligent use is not about saving time but getting better research done. In this presentation experts discuss how to build and adapt a Large Language Model (LLM) pipeline for research work. LLMs can be turned into a machine that not only annotates in a human way but also adapts theoretical literature to provide readings of the data for research use: an example here is the Populism Theory by Ernesto Laclau. Presenters account for how they have developed and are putting into use a multi-modal LLMs pipeline to serve several research questions in multiple research projects: primarily the Horizon Europe projects on social contracts and grievance politics. They demonstrate how the instrumental use of LLMs can have value in research life. How to do it - and what does it all mean?
A further question to ask is: how does the AI use change practices in the social-sciences and humanities (SSH) field? When discussing the university's role in speer-heading the development of LLM-based research the presenters acknowledge the expertise that is needed, the necessity to build on and contribute to open-source software development, and the infrastructure of running processes locally. Need for research labs and cumulative expertise would be important to acknowledge when moving deeper into the new era that has a lot to be concerned about, much to offer - but also requires new skills and tools.
Tomi Toivio is working in the HSSH as data analyst, developing a LMM pipeline and ways to scrape data in the post-API research context for the CO3 (
Emilia Palonen is Datafication Research Programme Director at the HSSH and Associate Professor in Political Science and the leader of the Helsinki Hub on Emotions Populism and Polarisation research groupi. The project's data is drawn from the European Parliamentary elections in 2024 from Instagram and TikTok using an post-API data-collecting strategy that also has been uncovering the feed of 30 synthetic and 30 organic profiles that drew data for ten European Union member states for four weeks.
Climate disinformation is often assumed to circulate within ideological echo chambers. But what if it doesn't stay contained? This talk presents findings from analysing over 12 million tweets during COP26 and COP27, revealing how climate disinformation actively flows outward across community boundaries through unexpected pathways and unlikely intermediaries.
Using a trained machine learning classifier on validated climate datasets, we assigned disinformation probabilities to tweets denying or undermining scientific consensus on climate change. Community detection algorithms identified distinct user clusters, and social network analysis traced information flows between disinformation, mixed, and non-disinformation communities.
Most striking is the discovery of inadvertent brokers; users becoming disinformation vectors without seemingly intending to. A journalist sharing a video of a tired-looking president at COP26 became a top disinformation mediator as climate skeptics weaponized the clip for conspiratorial narratives.
The talk addresses: To what extent is disinformation spread driven by content virality versus network structure? How do we account for users amplifying disinformation without subscribing to it? And what does it mean for platform governance and policy interventions when the most influential disinformation vectors might not be the ideologues but the unintentional amplifiers? These findings challenge prevailing assumptions that toxic content is siloed, revealing instead a diffuse and dynamic information ecosystem. Understanding these brokered pathways shifts the focus from simply removing bad actors to anticipating how mainstream engagement can legitimise problematic narratives.
Simon Lindgren is a Professor of Sociology at Umeå University in Sweden, where he is also the director of DIGSUM, an interdisciplinary research centre studying the social dimensions of digital technology, and the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Digital Social Research. His research is about politics, power, and resistance at the intersection of society and digital technologies. He uses critical discourse approaches, computational text analysis, and social network analysis to study issues relating to movements, mobilization, opinions, and identities.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is typically framed as a biomedical and microbiological problem, yet the conditions under which resistance emerges and circulates are profoundly social and infrastructural. The Finnish Centre of Excellence in Multidisciplinary AMR Research (FIMAR) is a multidisciplinary consortium comprising five disciplines: clinical microbiology, environmental microbiology, evolutionary biology, bioinformatics - and ourselves, Sociology. Together, we seek a paradigm change in AMR research by developing a method to integrate microbiological and sociological data for the purposes of understanding AMR spread and evolution across various scales from the molecular to the level of political economies. Often, qualitative and quantitative methods are siloed, both in terms of practices within academia and in terms of journal publications. Problems like AMR which are micro-bio-social and therefore multiple by nature necessitate moving beyond these silos. As the ultimate aim of FIMAR is to integrate AMR data from multiple disciplines, we have taken a mixed-methods approach to our data set that draws on both qualitative and quantitative analyses. At stake in this work, situated as it is in a multidisciplinary context, is how to hold complexity across multiple epistemological registers in such a way that enhances our shared understanding of AMR.
As such, we developed a multi-model study to recruit 'index' households (diverse by setting and socioeconomic risk) in Cotonou, Abomey-Calavi, and Grand-Popo (Benin) to characterise how exposures arise in everyday life and how these relate to microbial findings. As the sociological component of the research project, we conducted in-depth interviews and mapping exercises with 9 index households on daily routines, practices and understandings of microbial riskiness. Our analysis thus far have led us to conceptualise 12 dimensions of practices participants discussed in relation to microbes and their daily lives and we are continuing to explore analytical avenues to push our findings further. We hope that this work-in-progress talk will invite discussion, comments and questions about using mixed methods approaches in hopes that this will support and invigorate future efforts in this area.
Iona Walker is a medical anthropologist fascinated by the poetry and science of being human in a more-than-human world. Iona completed her PhD in social anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (funded by the Wellcome Trust) where she conducted ethnographic fieldwork with scientists at British research-intensive university during the Covid-19 pandemic. This work explored how scientists imagine, respond to and understand human-microbe relationships in the context of their research on antimicrobial resistance and respiratory tract infections. In particular, Iona’s research explores how researchers reconfigure their understandings of health, infection and human-microbe relationships, through their AMR research, away from antagonism and toward more situated, emergent forms of relations; as well as how scientists construct and articulate their everyday research practices as ‘AMR’ through the imperatives of academic knowledge production in the UK. Iona is a founding member of Beyond Resistance, an interdisciplinary network designed to catalyse curiosity and collaboration between the sciences, arts and humanities in regards to microbial challenges like AMR.
Artificial intelligence and big data systems have been widely criticized for the actual and potential harms they produce. In response, policymakers have introduced legislation to mitigate these risks. Industry narratives of responsible or trustworthy AI often aim to reassure citizens and regulators, while recent U.S. policy developments have instead dismissed ethical guidelines, fairness tests, and legal constraints as innovation-stifling burdens. In contrast, despite the European Commission’s recent retreat from strong AI regulation, public support for robust safeguards remains high across the EU.
Beyond landmark legislation such as the AI Act, a complex social web of actors, institutions, and practices has emerged to contest and shape algorithmic systems. This talk focuses on the Netherlands as a case study to examine how custodianship for algorithmic systems is being developed within public management. It explores the rise of formal education in AI literacies, the professionalization of roles dedicated to data and AI ethics, and the growing importance of government-mandated supervisory authorities. These forms of custodianship intersect with broader practices of contestation—spanning activism, advocacy, investigative journalism, and political deliberation, often at the municipal level.
Finally, the talk reflects on the role of action researchers in critical data and AI studies, examining how they can contribute to and strengthen these emerging practices. Drawing on the recent publication Collaborative Research in the Datafied Society: Methods and Practices of Investigation and Intervention (Schäfer, Van Es, Lauriault, 2024), it invites discussion on the opportunities and challenges of collaborative and action-oriented research in shaping a democratic digital society.
Discussant: Minna Ruckenstein
Mirko Tobias Schäfer is Associate Professor of AI, Data & Society and Science Lead of the Data School Utrecht University. His research explores the societal impact of datafication, algorithms, and artificial intelligence, with a particular focus on public management, and citizenship. He is co-editor of Collaborative Research in the Datafied Society. Methods and Practices of Investigation and Intervention (Amsterdam University Press, 2024). Dr. Schäfer also serves on the Advisory Board Analytics of the Netherlands' Ministry of Finance. For the past three years, he was a Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki’s Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities.
We all want to read less so we make robots do the reading. Sadly, the lazy language models do not have the patience to read the long texts either, and so they read a bit from the beginning, a bit from the end and then make up the rest. How much time is actually saved, if the robot reader is not reliable enough and one has to fact check it and essentially read the long texts?
This talk presents an extension to the findings of the paper “
Erkki Mervaala is a researcher at the Finnish Environment Institute’s Politics of Knowledge group, and a PhD student at the University of Helsinki. His research interests include climate change & economic growth representations and intersections in the media, and the buzz and hype around large language models and generative artificial intelligence.
Whose Angels? is a project funded by the Kone Foundation that integrates photographic art with interdisciplinary research, encompassing the study of religions, art history, and folkloristics. The project aims to investigate contemporary vernacular and popular imagination and worldviews. We utilize contemporary fine-art angel-themed phogographs, created by our artist Hanne Kiiveri, as prompts to elicit thoughts and feelings from diverse audiences. These photographs have been exhibited in various venues and presented to a range of audiences during workshops. The responses—opinions, memories, critiques, and associations—gathered from viewers serve as research material, primarily documented in real-time. Additionally, some audience members have volunteered to collaborate with the artist in designing new angel images, and this creative process has also been recorded as part of our research, including interviews, observations, and the final artworks. One of the objectives of our project is to explore and assess this kind of ethnographic methodology (in which we first construct our case and then study it) and its potential for future research.
Terhi Utriainen is professor in the Study of religions at the University of Helsinki. Her interests include ethnographic study of contemporary vernacular religion, religion, gender and embodiment, and ritual studies. She has recently directed the project Learning from new religion and spirituality (funded by the Research council of Finland 2019-2023) and presently directs the 3,5-year project Whose Angels? funded by the Kone Foundation.
Oscar Ortiz-Nieminen holds a PhD in Art History and a MTh in the Study of Religion. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. His research interests lie in the intersections of religions and worldviews with visual culture and with the built environment.
This talk presents both empirical findings and methodological insights from the Belgian interuniversity research project TACOS, which investigates preschool teachers’ language-supporting competencies through a multimethod approach. The study uses mobile eye-tracking (MET) to examine, before and after a professional development intervention, the question: Which children are being overlooked, and with what consequences for their language development opportunities?
In a randomized controlled trial with a posttest-only comparison group, we captured 1,300 minutes of classroom interaction involving 65 preschool teachers and 575 children. Multilevel negative binomial regression models revealed systematic inequalities in teacher attention: linguistically vulnerable children—those perceived by teachers as having low speaking confidence, weaker language skills, and/or a different home language—received less attention. Importantly, results provide novel evidence that teachers’ attention allocation can be positively influenced through targeted professional development.
The talk will address the following themes:
Thibaut Duthois is a Belgian doctoral researcher at Ghent University, working on educational inequality and teacher professionalization under the supervision of Prof. Ruben Vanderlinde, Prof. Maribel Montero Perez, and Prof. Piet Van Avermaet. His main research interest lies in early childhood education, with a particular focus on uncovering mechanisms of inequality at the teacher level. To this end, he employs mobile eye-tracking technology to study teachers’ visual attention and interaction patterns in the classroom.
The discussion on ethical challenges is timely because co-research is becoming more common in various disciplines. However, there is no clear instruction on the ethical procedures, which is a concern raised by TENK, as well. This panel discussion of four experts at the University of Helsinki will commence with brief introductions from each presenter. This Brown Bag seminar is part of a Catalyst Grant project led by Auli Vähäkangas, who will also moderate the discussion.
Meri Kulmala is a sociologist and a specialist in inequality studies, with extensive experience in co-research involving various marginalized and minoritized groups. She serves as Research Director at the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. Among her responsibilities, she leads two interdisciplinary research networks: the Helsinki Inequality Initiative (INEQ) and Resilient and Just Systems (RESET). She also leads the SRC OBaMa Consortium, which co-investigates and co-creates solutions to inequalities in democratic participation together with marginalized and minoritized groups. She is also a founding member of the Finnish Co-research Network. Her interests in co-research in relation to research ethics focuses particularly on identifying and addressing situations where the core principles of co-research—such as participation, power-sharing, and valuing lived and embodied expertise—come into conflict with the structural constraints of academia. These tensions often emerge throughout the research process: beginning with the inclusion of lived experience in the design phase, continuing through the balancing of power during empirical work itself, and culminating in the dissemination stage, where issues of ownership and authorship become especially pronounced.
Reetta Mietola a university researcher in RESET – Resilient and Just Systems, at Faculty of Social Sciences, UH, and the deputy PI in the SRC funded OBaMa project, studying barriers of democratic participation with marginalized and minoritized groups. Her interest in co-research was initiated by disability studies, more specifically inclusive research developed in this field. She is particularly interested in how co-research challenges ideas and practices taken for granted in academic research: who can lead research, what kind of capacity is required from a researcher and in relation to this, what is needed for research to be inclusive. This also presents challenges for research ethics: how to balance protection with access to participation; what does informed consent mean in practice and in a co-research process; how are risks and related responsibilities negotiated within the research team; how to deal with authorship, and what kind of ethical consideration does this involve.
Auli Vähäkangas is Professor in Practical Theology and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Theology, University of Helsinki. She is a member of the Research Ethics Committee in the Humanities and Social and Behavioural Sciences at the University of Helsinki as well as a member in RESET and INEQ. Vähäkangas’ research has focused on death and dying and on people in vulnerable situations. Presently she is leading Meaningful Deathscapes: Worldview minority cemeteries in Finland (MeDea, 2024-2028). Ethical review practices are also challenged by collaborative research. It is important to discuss how far the current ethical guidelines fit the settings of collaborative research, and to what extent we can assume that different research collaborators adhere to our research ethics. Vähäkangas acknowledges the risks existing with the researchers’ roles and questions of power in connection to co-research method. Questions of power are multidimensional, both between academic and participant researchers and between those PRs who are in a leadership position in the worldview communities and those who have a member status in them. Questions of power bring ethical challenges to the co-research project from the planning stages to the dissemination of research, but especially challenging are the power relations during the field work.
The digital information environment is changing rapidly, with challenges such as disinformation, generative AI, and the spread of short-form video platforms. Traditional approaches to teaching information literacy often struggle to keep pace with these shifts or to reach people outside specialist or academic settings. This presentation introduces Infodemic Inc., a digital educational game developed as part of the InfoLead project, a collaboration between the University of Helsinki, the University of Oxford, and the University of Florence. Alongside executive training for judges and policymakers and a toolkit and casebook, the game is one element in the project's efforts to build professional networks and strengthen media literacy.
The presentation also asks what role games can play in communicating research results and reaching wider audiences. Can complex academic and legal debates about platform governance be made accessible through playful interaction without losing their nuance? How might game-based formats complement, or even challenge, more traditional ways of sharing research and knowledge? Drawing on the design and early testing of Infodemic Inc., the session considers both the potential and the limits of games as tools for popularizing research and supporting media literacy. This session launches the new game/simulator developed by the InfoLead project but also discussed its wider ramifications for changing academic practices.
Dr Aleksi Knuutila is a University Researcher at the Department of Sociology at the University of Helsinki and the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities. After his doctorate in the Digital Anthropology programme at University College London, Knuutila’s research has focused on online harms such as misinformation and harassment and how political groups take advantage of contemporary information environments. His current research projects focus on developing tools and infrastructure for journalists working on conflicts and applying generative AI to interpretative research workflows.
Dr Matti Pohjonen currently works as a Senior Researcher for the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), University of Helsinki, working with methodological development on the use of internet and social media data, including debates on generative AI and LLMs. He also currently co-leads The EU Horizon-funded project ARM, which focuses on information suppression and information freedoms in China, Russia, Ethiopia and Rwanda and InfoLead, a digital literacy project developed together with the University of Oxford and University of Florence.
The Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship (CRDDS) at the University of Colorado Boulder is an interdisciplinary research center focusing on research data infrastructure and expertise. CRDDS is built on a partnership between the University Libraries and Research Computing, and represents an uncommon fusion of units on the academic and operational sides of the university from various disciplinary and professional backgrounds with a common mission to empower researchers navigating the research data lifecycle on campus. This work is achieved mainly through collaborative grant opportunities, workshops and seminars, and certificate and micro-credential programs. In addition to giving an overview of our work, I will outline the ways in which CRDDS is experiencing the shifting federal research and higher education landscape at the university and within the scientific context in Boulder, which includes university centers, labs, institutes, and other units as well as federal laboratories.
Thea Lindquist is Professor and Executive Director of the Center for Research Data and Digital Scholarship at the University of Colorado Boulder, an interdisciplinary center specializing in expertise and infrastructure for data-intensive research and education and in open publishing. Her research interests include integrating historical and computational approaches in the study of 17th-century European history and data curation for interdisciplinary and highly collaborative research.
Philosopher Achille Mbembe once remarked that Africal holds a paradoxical position in modern formations of knowledge. On the one hand, he writes, “it has been largely assumed that "things African” are residual entities, the study of which does not contribute anything to the knowledge of the world or of the human condition in general.” Yet, on the other hand, he also notes, Africa has always been also perceived as a kind of laboratory that can help “gauge the limits of our epistemological imagination or to pose questions about how we know what we know and what that knowledge is grounded upon (Mbembe, 2010, p. 654).”
University of the Witwatersrand (Wits) and the University of Edinburgh recently launched a new SARChi SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities, appointing Professor Gagliardone as its inaugural holder. The aim of the 5-year Chair is to advance more inclusive and equitable digital futures in social sciences and humanities research globally. Building on the long critical tradition of research in South Africa, the Chair aims to reposition Africa as hub of conceptual, technological and methodological innovation amidst the current boon in the use of AI in social sciences and humanities by highlighting how historically marginalised forms of knowledge can inform humane and socially just approaches to digital transformation and digital humanities research.
Matti similarly recently received Africa Programme seed funding for his ongoing project “Generative AI and Africa: New Methodological Directions for Social Sciences and Humanities Research (GAINS).” This project aims to critically explore the use of generative AI and large-language models (LLMs) for social sciences and humanities research in Africa. By experimenting with custom-trained AI models and fostering collaboration between Finnish and South African institutions, it seeks to enhance research methodologies and facilitate knowledge exchange globally.
Building on this ongoing dialogue between HSSH, University of Helsinki and University of Witswatersrand, this talk openly discusses some of the challenges in such North-South collaboration in social science and digital humanities. What are some of the theoretical, methodological and empirical questions that are raised and how can critical research potentially help address this? What are the limits of our epistemological imagination?
Iginio Gagliardone in the inaugural SA-UK Bilateral Chair in Digital Humanities at Wits University in Johannesburg, South Africa, and a fellow of Wits’ Machine Intelligence and Neural Discovery (MIND) Institute. He is the author of “The Politics of Technology in Africa” (2016) and “China, Africa, and the Future of the Internet” (2019). His most recent work examines the international politics of Artificial Intelligence and the emergence of new imageries of technological evolution in Africa.
Matti Pohjonen currently works as a Senior Researcher for the Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities (HSSH), University of Helsinki, working with methodological development on the use of internet and social media data, including debates on generative AI and LLMs. He also currently co-leads The EU Horizon-funded project ARM, which focuses on information suppression and information freedoms in China, Russia, Ethiopia and Rwanda as well as InfoLead, which is a digital literacy project and an online tool targeting judges and policymakers developed together with the University of Oxford and University of Florence.