Research Interests:
Perspective-taking is ubiquitous in everyday life: in many situations people must consider perspectives distinct from our own, including others’ emotions, perceptions, knowledge, and beliefs. Yet this fundamental cognitive skill is subject to many underexplored constraints. Dr. Galati’s research program examines how people keep track of each other’s perspective in conversation, how they adapt their language and behavior to coordinate when working together, and how successful that coordination ultimately is.
In a health care context, she is interested in the relationship between treatment outcomes and the interactions between patients and professionals in the health care system. For example, identifying linguistic signatures of miscommunication in these interactions could be valuable for predicting divergence from treatment protocols and could help mitigate its potentially detrimental effects. In another line of research, she is interested in leveraging virtual reality (VR) technology to examine how health-related practices are related to behavior in (real and virtual) space. Finally, she is broadly interested in perspective-taking skills across the lifespan, and how decrements in these skills may impact the well-being of older adults, in particular.
