Frank Van Overwalle

Frank Van Overwalle is a professor at the Faculty of Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Belgium. After obtaining his PhD in 1987 on the theme "Causes of success and failure of first-year students: an attributional approach", he became psychology professor at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. He worked on attribution and social cognition, applied his and others' research to the development of artificial neural network models of social cognition, and eventually switched to research on social neuroscience with "real" brains in 2005. 

He received various scholarships of excellence from his university and the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders on these topics. 

His major research interest is currently on social neuroscience, or the neurological underpinning of social cognition, in particular on person impression formation involving traits, (false) beliefs, goals and so on. His most current interest is on the somewhat ignored ‘little brain’ or cerebellum, which is responsible for the identification and automatization of sequences of social actions, and prediction of new sequences. Especially the posterior area is involved in social action sequences, or routines, in which we and others interact with each other, and anticipate individual or shared beliefs and future actions. This social neuroscience interest follows from his earlier research on connectionist models of important domains in social cognition: causal attribution, group biases, person impression formation and attitude formation and change (including cognitive dissonance). He conducted simulations on representative findings from the literature in these domains in order to develop a general and unified process model of these judgments in social cognition.