Welcome to SIM lab!
We study social intelligence and behaviour in humans, story characters, and machines. Curious how these elements fit together? See our Projects and Publications pages, or get in touch!
The lab kicked off on May 6, 2025, and is a in some respects a continuation of the Creative Intelligence Lab and the Telling Story Project.
Why SIM Lab?
SIM stands for social intelligence modelling, which is reflected in our research using agent-based and classification models. But it also stands for stories in the mind, reflecting what social cognition in essence is: a form storytelling in which we (silently or out loud) connect visible elements of the social world to invisible ones, such as beliefs, intentions, desires, and emotions. We also work with children aged 4-12 to study the link between storytelling and forms of social cognition known as Theory of Mind or Intentional Reasoning. And we train language models using narrative data to study the link between stories and intelligence in a novel way. We also study language/AI models that collaborate with humans on various tasks. Here, SIM refers to simulation. After all, in order to coordinate actions successfully, both sides have to simulate the others’ perspective.
Latest News
- Tom and Michiel present at CoNLL 2026Tom Kouwenhoven and Michiel van der Meer presented “Traces of Social Competence in Large Language Models” at the 30th Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning. [Read the paper here.]
- Lennard presents at HHAI 2026Lennard Froma presented “Seeking Information with RAG-Assistants: Does Model Size Matter in Human-AI Collaborations?” at the Hybrid Human-Artificial Intelligence conference. [Read the paper here.]
- Aida presents at CMN 2026Aida Gholami presented “The Architecture of Stickiness: Identity Marking and Narrative Overdetermination in AI-Generated Scenes” at the Computational Models of Narrative. [Read the paper here.]