Nicholas Duran (PhD in Cognitive Psychology) is an associate professor in the School of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He is interested in the dynamic interplay between cognition, language, and action while individuals and groups engage in complex real-world tasks. He applies insights gleaned from this basic research program to build new computational tools and methods to help people become better communicators and better problem-solvers. Duran has published more than 70 journal papers, book chapters, and conference proceedings and his work has been funded by numerous grants. He currently serves as the director of the "Cognition, Behavior, and Information" group (CBI: https://newcollege.asu.edu/cbi) at ASU and is a founding executive committee member of a multi-interdisciplinary consortium of data scientists at ASU (B2C2: https://newcollege.asu.edu/b2c2). The goals of both initiatives are well-aligned with Duran’s overall research agenda: to work across disciplinary boundaries to produce innovative research and to make data-driven discoveries.
The specifics of his work revolve around behavioral dynamics and cognition as embedded and extended to complex environments. Be it in how people comprehend language, take another’s perspective to solve problems, or even in how they deceive, real insights can be had by examining cognition as expressed within patterns of behavior over time – and importantly – as a process that is deeply influenced by socially-rich and communicative contexts. In pursuing these lines of work, he uses a variety of laboratory-based and online experimental methods, and applies advanced computational modeling to support theory. Duran is an expert in collecting data that is multimodal, multi-feature, and temporally extended, sourced from the direct capture of motion, speech, physiology, and language, as well as collected from large-scale naturally-occurring datasets. To understand this data, he uses a range of novel techniques, including computer-mouse tracking, motion capture, computational linguistics, discourse modeling, acoustic analysis, physiological sensing, and nonlinear time series analyses.
Please see http://dynamicog.org/projects/ for recent major projects.
Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology, University of Memphis
Cognitive dynamics, interpersonal coordination and synchrony, perspective-taking, motion tracking, language processes, deception, natural language processing
REFEREED JOURNAL PUBLICATIONS
Duran, N. D., Fusaroli, R., & Paxton, A. (2019). ALIGN: Analyzing linguistic interactions with generalizable techniques – a Python library. Psychological Methods. Advance Online Publication.
Galati, A., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D. (2019). Social and configural effects on the cognitive dynamics of perspective-taking. Journal of Memory and Language, 104, 1-24.
Lau, K. H., Randall, A., Duran, N. D., & Chun, T. (2018). Examining the effects of couples’ real-time stress and coping processes on interaction quality: Language use as a mediator. Frontiers in Psychology, 9, 1-14.
Crossley, S. A., Duran, N., Kim, Y., Lester, T., & Clark, S. (2018). The action dynamics of native and non-native speakers of English in processing active and passive sentences. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism. Advance online publication.
Duran, N. D., Nicholson, S., & Dale, R. (2017). The hidden appeal and aversion to political conspiracies as revealed in the response dynamics of partisans. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 73, 268-278.
Duran, N. D. & Fusaroli, R. (2017). Conversing with a devil's advocate: Interpersonal synchronization dynamics in deception and conflict. PLOS ONE. 12(6): e0178140.
Schillinger, D, McNamara, D, Crossley, Scott, Moffet, H, Sarkar, U, Duran, N. D., Allen, J, Oryn, D, Karter, A. J. (2017). The next frontier in communication and the ECLIPPSE study: Bridging the digital divide in secure messaging. Journal of Diabetes Research, 2017, 1-9.
Coco, M. I., & Duran, N. D. (2016). When expectancies collide: Action dynamics reveal the interaction between stimulus plausibility and congruency. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1920-1931.
Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & Galati, A. (2016). Towards integrative dynamic models for adaptive perspective-taking. Topics in Cognitive Science, 8, 761-779.
Tabatabaeian, M., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D (2015). Self-serving dishonest decisions can show facilitated cognitive dynamics. Cognitive Processing, 16, 291-300.
Duran, N. D., & Dale, R. (2014). Perspective-taking in dialogue as self-organization under social constraints. New Ideas in Psychology, 32, 131-146.
Dale, R. & Duran, N. D. (2013). Dealing with complexity differently: from interaction-dominant dynamics to theoretical plurality. Ecological Psychology, 25, 248-255.
Duran, N. D., & Dale, R., Kello, C., Street, C. N. H., & Richardson, D. C. (2013). Exploring the movement dynamics of deception. Frontiers in Psychology, 4, 1-16.
Dale, R., Fusaroli, R., Duran, N. D., & Richardson, D. C. (2013). The self-organization of human interaction. In B. Ross (Ed.), Psychology of Learning and Motivation, vol. 59 (pp. 43-95). Elsevier, Inc: Academic Press.
Dale, R., Duran, N. D., & Morehead, J. R. (2012). Prediction during statistical learning, and implications for the implicit/explicit divide. Advances in Cognitive Psychology, 8, 196-209.
Duran, N. D., & Dale, R., & Kreuz, R. J. (2011). Listeners invest in an assumed other’s perspective despite cognitive cost. Cognition, 121, 22-40.
Dale, R. & Duran, N. D. (2011). The cognitive dynamics of negated sentence verification. Cognitive Science, 35, 983-996.
Myers, J. C., McCarthy, P. M., Duran, N. D., & McNamara, D. S. (2011). The bit in the middle: A computational analysis of the linguistic features of body paragraphs. Behavior Research Methods, 43, 201-209.
Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & McNamara, D. S. (2010). The action dynamics of overcoming the truth. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 17, 486-491.
Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Hall, C., & McNamara, D. S. (2010). The linguistic correlates of conversational deception: Comparing natural language processing technologies. Applied Psycholinguistics, 31, 439-462.
Bellissens, C., Jeuniaux, P., Duran, N. D., McNamara, D. S. (2010). A text relatedness and dependency computational model: Using Latent Semantic Analysis and Coh-Metrix to predict self-explanation quality. Studia Informatica Universalis, 8, 85-125.
McCarthy, P. M., Hall, C., Duran N. D., Doiuchi, M., Duncan, B., Fujiwara, Y., & McNamara, D. S., (2009). A computational analysis of journal abstracts written by Japanese, American, and British scientists. The ESPecialist, 30, 141-173.
Dale, R., Roche, J., & Duran, N. D. (2008). Language is complex. International Journal of Psychology and Psychological Therapy, 8, 351-362. (Invited article).
McCarthy, P. M., Renner, A. M., Duncan, M. G., Duran, N. D., Lightman, E. J., & McNamara. D. S. (2008). Identifying topic sentencehood. Behavior Research Methods, 40, 647-664.
Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C, & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Using temporal cohesion to predict temporal coherence in narrative and expository texts. Behavior Research Methods, 39, 212-223.
REFEREED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS
Computer Science
Grafsgaard, J., Duran, N. D., Randall, A., Tao, C., & D’Mello, S. (2018). Generative models of nonverbal synchrony in close relationships. The 13th IEEE International Conference on Automatic Face and Gesture Recognition, Xi’an, China. (8 pages)
O’Hora, D., Redfern, S., Duran, N. D., Zgonnikov, A., & Sweeney, D. (2018). In-game motion dynamics provide a means of exploring the cognitive dynamics of deception. The 2018 IEEE Games, Entertainment, Media Conference (GEM), Galway, Ireland. (8 pages)
Cognitive Science
Yonehiro, J. & Duran, N. D. (2018). Measuring attention control abilities with a gaze following antisaccade paradigm. Proceedings of the 40th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Heidari, A., D’Arienzo, M., Crossley, S. A., and Duran, N. D. (2017). Computational analysis of lexical and cohesion differences in deceptive language: The role of accordance. Proceedings of the AAAI 30th International Florida Artificial Intelligence Society Conference (FLAIRS 2017) (6 pages).
Duran, N. D., Nicholson, S., & Dale, R. (2015). Tracking the response dynamics of implicit partisan biases. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin: TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Coco, M. I. & Duran, N. D. (2015). Incidental memory for naturalistic scenes: Exposure, semantics, and encoding. Proceedings of the 37th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Austin: TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Tabatabaeian, M., Dale, R., & Duran, N. D. (2014). Facilitation of dishonesty in self-serving tasks. Proceedings of the 36th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1562-1567). Austin: TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Duran, N. D. & Dale, R. (2012). Increased vigilance in monitoring others' mental states during deception. In N. Miyake, D. Peebles, & R. P. Cooper (Eds.), Proceedings of the 34th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1518-1523). Austin: TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
McCarthy, P. M., Duran, N. D., & Booker, L. M. (2012). The devil is in the details: New directions in deception analysis. Proceedings of the AAAI 25th Annual Conference of the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, San Marco Islands (6 pages) (Invited proceeding).
Duran, N. D. & Dale, R. (2011). Spatial cognition adapts to social context. Proceedings of the 33rd Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (pp. 1111-1116). Austin: TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Duran, N.D., Crossley, S., Hall, C., McCarthy, P., & McNamara, D. S. (2009). Expanding a catalogue of deceptive linguistic features with NLP technologies. Proceedings of the AAAI 22nd Annual Conference of the International Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society, Sanibel Island, FL (6 pages).
Duran, N. D. & Dale, R. (2009). Predictive arm placement in the statistical learning of position sequences. Proceedings of the 31st Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Amsterdam, Netherlands (pp. 893-898). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Bellissens, C., Jeuniaux, P., Duran, N. D., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Towards a textual cohesion model that predicts self-explanation inference generation as a function of text structure and readers’ knowledge. In D. S. McNamara and G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Nashville, TN (pp. 815-820). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Duran, N. D., Bellissens, C., Taylor, R. S., & McNamara, D. S. (2007). Quantifying text difficulty with automated indices of cohesion and semantics. In D. S. McNamara and G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Nashville, TN (pp. 233-238). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Willits, J. A., D’Mello, S. K., Duran, N. D., & Olney, A. (2007). Distributional statistics and thematic role relationships. In D. S. McNamara and G. Trafton (Eds.), Proceedings of the 29th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Nashville, TN (pp. 707-712). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
Duran, N. D., McCarthy, P. M., Graesser, A. C., & McNamara, D. S. (2006). Using Coh-Metrix temporal indices to predict psychological measures of time. In R. Sun & N. Miyake (Eds.), Proceedings of the 28th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Vancouver, Canada (pp. 190-195). Austin, TX: Cognitive Science Society (6 pages).
BOOK CHAPTERS AND COMMENTARIES
Vinson, D. W., Dale, R., Tabatabaeian, M. & Duran, N. D. (2015). Seeing and believing: Social influences on language processing. In Mishra, R. K., Srinivasan, N., & Huettig, F. (Eds.) Attention and Vision in Language Processing. Springer: India. (pp. 197-213).
Duran, N. D., & Dale, R. (2014). Theory of mind. In T. R. Levine (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Deception (pp. 883-886).
Duran, N. D., & Street, C. H. (2014). Nonverbal cues. In T. R. Levine (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Deception (pp 721-724).
Dale, R., Duran, N. D., & Roche, J. (2011). Dynamics of action during language processing. In R. K. Mishra & N. Srinivasan (Eds.), Language-Cognition Interface: State of the Art (pp. 114-135). Muenchen: LINCOM Europa.
Duran, N. D., Dale, R., & Richardson, D. (2014). A mass assembly of associative mechanisms: a dynamical systems account of natural social interaction. Behavioral and Brain Sciences (commentary), 37, 198.
Summer 2022 | |
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Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
Spring 2022 | |
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Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 580 | Practicum |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Fall 2021 | |
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Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 492 | Honors Directed Study |
PSY 493 | Honors Thesis |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Summer 2021 | |
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Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 384 | Psych Undergrad Teaching Asst |
Spring 2021 | |
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Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 580 | Practicum |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 598 | Special Topics |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Fall 2020 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 323 | Sensation and Perception |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 492 | Honors Directed Study |
PSY 493 | Honors Thesis |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Summer 2020 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
Spring 2020 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 598 | Special Topics |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Fall 2019 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 323 | Sensation and Perception |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 492 | Honors Directed Study |
PSY 493 | Honors Thesis |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Summer 2019 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
Spring 2019 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 598 | Special Topics |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Fall 2018 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 323 | Sensation and Perception |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 394 | Special Topics |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 492 | Honors Directed Study |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 580 | Practicum |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Spring 2018 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 598 | Special Topics |
PSY 599 | Thesis |
Fall 2017 | |
---|---|
Course Number | Course Title |
PSY 323 | Sensation and Perception |
PSY 360 | Cognitive Science |
PSY 394 | Special Topics |
PSY 399 | Supervised Research |
PSY 492 | Honors Directed Study |
PSY 499 | Individualized Instruction |
PSY 580 | Practicum |
PSY 592 | Research |
PSY 593 | Applied Project |
PSY 599 | Thesis |