Ryssa Moffat

neuroimaging

While mapping brain activity cannot directly explain behaviour, it has the potential to provide neurophysiological context to cognition and behaviour. In my research, I mainly use functional near-infrared spectrocopy (fNIRS) to probe changes in blood flow on the cortex. fNIRS is exciting because it is a portable neuroimaging technique which can be implemented in everyday social settings, such collaborative activities between generations (Moffat et al., 2024a).

My PhD research explored how emotions conveyed in speech (normal and degraded, as if passed through a cochlear implant) are represented in the cortex and how they map onto listeners' emotion recognition abilities (Moffat et al., 2023). More recently, I have investigated the influence of social obervation and motor synchrony (a form of interpersonal coordination) on activity in frontal brain regions, with specific attention paid to the observed individual's ability to supress motor responses (Moffat et al., 2024b). Another of my projects has looked at how embodying movements by mirroring someone else influence our appraisal when we see other dyads repeating the same sequence of movements (Moffat & Cross, 2024).

friendships spanning ages

In Prep.

interpersonal coordination

Synching up with other people, whether in our movements, emotions, belief and preference, or even neural activity is a form of 'interpersonal coordination'. This coordination with others is central to how much we like each other, how well we collaborate – in short, it's key for relationship building and maintenance.

Recently, I have investigated how playing a mirror-game with a peer can enhance performance on cognitive tasks. This research also examines how being observed by one's partner from the mirror-game during the cognitive assessment impacts brain activity (Moffat et al., 2024).

Another synchrony-related project investigates how we, as individuals, differ in our aesthetic appreciation, or enjoyment, when we watch other people engage in motor synchrony (Moffat & Cross, 2024a), and how engaging in synchrony may influence our brain's responses to synchrony that we observe (Moffat & Cross, 2024b; Cross et al., 2024). My work also explores our abilities and/or willingness to engage interpersonal synchrony through the mirror game reveals about our personalities and bodily skills, and how well other people can extract this information from watching our mirror-game movements (Moffat et al., 2024).

human–robot interaction

Social robots are appearing increasingly often in homes, classrooms, and public venues. These robots are used as companions and teachers, who can potentially allieviate loneliness and support children with anxiety related to learning new skills, such as reading.

I have been involved series of projects researching which features children desire in a robot reading-buddy. Children met three different robots and read to the robot of their choice. This project took children's qualitative assessments of the reading experience into account, and also probed their preferences using quantitative ratings of various robot-features. Children found robot comforting, cool, and sometimes distracting (Caruana et al., 2023a), see also (Caruana et al., 2023b).

In the second project, we took a less constrained approach and invited children to illustrate their own reading robot buddies. Children with and without reading difficulty took part and their interviews highlighted the need for personalisation of robots for learning to read (Moffat et al., 2025).