“This award puts our group at the forefront of social cognition research. “The problem with measuring social cognition is that we still don’t have a great universal measure,” Pinkham said. To test emotion recognition — one of the core aspects of social cognition — researchers show subjects pictures of someone’s face or a video of somebody expressing emotion. The ability to understand behavior in terms of intentions or mental states — called mentalizing — is another key factor in social cognition. Finding a way to compare and combine results is increasingly important as schizophrenia research, like many other fields, moves toward utilizing big data to its fullest extent.