Ketika Garg, PhD

[ket̪ɪkɑ ɡərɡ]

केतिका गर्ग

Hi.

I am a postdoctoral researcher at Caltech in the Mobbs Lab. I have a PhD in Cognitive and Information Sciences from UC Merced. Before moving to the US for the PhD life, I grew up in India and studied Biology at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Mohali.

Our cognitive and social capacities guide how we navigate the environments we function in—physical, social, and increasingly sociotechnical. My research examines how the constraints and affordances of these environments shape cognition and decision-making, and how our decisions and interactions, in turn, support adaptive behavior in individuals and groups. Across these scales, I ask how individuals and groups achieve goals, how they coordinate and combine their knowledge to be collectively intelligent, and what leads to inefficiencies, conflict, and polarization.

To study these questions, I integrate perspectives from cognitive science, social psychology, behavioral ecology, complex systems, and computational social science. I apply a rich toolkit that integrates experimental, theoretical, and computational approaches: I develop gamified and interactive experiments that capture cognition, decision-making, and social interaction in naturalistic, continuous-action settings, and combine these with agent-based modeling, real-world data, network analysis, natural language processing, and computational models of cognition and decision-making.

When not researching (or even while researching), I often think about patterns and oddities of our social world — pressing questions like how science as a complex, collaborative institution works, and why Bollywood songs don’t last longer than 3 minutes anymore. I sometimes apply my computational skills to play around with these questions, given the plethora of social data around us.

I owe a large part of my work to my amazing collaborators and enjoy learning about these topics from perspectives of different disciplines — if you are interested in similar research themes and would like to collaborate, drop a line!