Inaugural Lecture of Professor Jennifer Cook

I like the way you move: movement, dopamine and social connection

What makes us good at connecting with other people? Most theories suggest it’s about complex skills like empathy or mindreading. But our research shows that something much more basic also matters: how well we control our body movements. Think about being in the right place at the right time to shake someone’s hand, or the subtle flick of hair that signals belonging in a group. These small movements can have a big impact on how we connect socially.

In this talk, I’ll share my research journey, beginning with autism, imitation, and body movements, and exploring how motor control in autism can shape social understanding.

I’ll then build on findings from Parkinson’s Disease, a condition linked to low dopamine levels. Parkinson’s affects both movement and social abilities, and our research highlights dopamine’s crucial role in both.

Finally, I’ll show that while autism and Parkinson’s are both associated with distinctive styles of body movement, the patterns are not the same. This suggests that body movements and facial expressions could form the basis of powerful new tools that may one day help speed up diagnosis.

Biography 

Professor Jennifer Cook is a psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist with a primary research interest in social cognition. Her wider expertise spans emotions, body language, social learning, autism, Parkinson’s Disease, and neurochemistry. She studied Psychology at the University of Bath, graduating in 2007, before completing a Wellcome Trust-funded PhD in Neuroscience at University College London (2007–2011). She then worked with Professor Barbara Sahakian at the University of Cambridge (2011–2012) and at the Donders Institute in the Netherlands, where she held an AXA research fellowship with Professor Roshan Cools. In 2014, she became a Lecturer at City University London, and the following year moved to the University of Birmingham, where she established her own research group with support from an ERC Starting Grant. Professor Cook has received multiple awards for her work, including the BPS Undergraduate Award, the Frith Prize from the Experimental Psychology Society, the Philip Leverhulme Prize, and the British Association for Cognitive Neuroscience Early Career Award.