Psychology seminars

I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of new empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults.

The recent pandemic arrived at a time when mental health of children and young people was deteriorating, particular among teenage girls and young women. Lockdown produced a plethora of mental health surveys, but very few of these had pre-pandemic data. This talk will summarise the current evidence of how covid-19 seems to have affected the mental health of children and young people from various studies in the UK.

Research on analogical processing and reasoning has provided strong evidence that the use of adequate educational analogies has strong and positive effects on the learning of mathematics. In this talk I will show some experimental results suggesting that analogies based on spatial representations might be particularly effective to improve mathematics learning. Since fostering mathematics learning also involves addressing psychosocial factors such as the development of mathematical anxiety, providing social incentives to learn, and fostering engagement and motivation, I will argue that one area to explore with great potential to improve math learning is applying analogical research in the development of learning games aimed to improve math learning. Finally, I will show some early prototypes of an educational project devoted to developing games designed to foster the learning of early mathematics in kindergarten children.

Analogical reasoning is a complex ‘high-level’ cognitive process characterised by making inferences based on analogical comparisons. As with other high-level processes, development takes place over a protracted time period and believed to result from changes in multiple ‘lower-level’ systems. In the case of analogical reasoning, changes in systems responsible for conceptual knowledge, task knowledge, inhibition, and working memory have all been causally implicated in development. Whilst there is evidence that each of these systems contributes to development, what the relative contribution of each across development is, and how they interact with each, remain largely unanswered questions. In this presentation, I will describe how cross-sectional trajectory analysis can be used as a complementary method to shed light on these questions.

Humans spend a lifetime learning, storing and refining a repertoire of motor memories. However, it is unknown what principle underlies the way our continuous stream of sensori-motor experience is segmented into separate memories and how we adapt and use this growing repertoire. Here we develop a principled theory of motor learning based on the key insight that memory creation, updating, and expression are all controlled by a single computation – contextual inference. Unlike dominant theories of single-context learning, our repertoire-learning model accounts for key features of motor learning that had no unified explanation and predicts novel phenomena, which we confirm experimentally. These results suggest that contextual inference is the key principle underlying how a diverse set of experiences is reflected in motor behavior.

Learning by analogy is a powerful tool children’s developmental repertoire, as well as in educational contexts such as mathematics, where the key knowledge base involves building flexible schemas. However, noticing and learning from analogies develops over time and is cognitively resource intensive. I review studies that provide insight into the relationship between mechanisms driving children’s developing analogy skills, highlighting environmental inputs (parent talk and prior experiences priming attention to relations) and neuro-cognitive factors (Executive Functions and brain injury). I then note implications for mathematics learning, reviewing experimental findings that show analogy can improve learning, but also that both individual differences in EFs and environmental factors that reduce available EFs such as performance pressure can predict student learning.

The question of free will has been topical for millennia, especially considering its links to moral responsibility and the ownership of that responsibility. Free will, or volition, is an incredibly complex phenomenon - and cannot easily be reduced to a single empirical paradigm. Roskies (2010) proposes that there are five cognitive aspects to be considered when developing a more complete understanding of volition. These are: intention, initiation, feeling, executive control and decision-making. Decision-making will be the focus of this talk, which steps through aspects of the philosophy of free will; highlights experimental paradigms stemming from the seminal work of Benjamin Libet et al., and proposes machine learning as a promising method in progressing the empirical studies of decision-making and free will.

Drug addiction is a chronically relapsing disorder characterized by compulsive drug use despite catastrophic personal consequences (e.g., loss of family, job) and even when the substance is no longer perceived as pleasurable. In this talk, I will present results of human neuroimaging studies, utilizing a multimodal approach (neuropsychology, functional magnetic resonance imaging, event-related potentials recordings), to explore the neurobiology underlying the core psychological impairments in drug addiction (impulsivity, drive/motivation, insight/awareness) as associated with its clinical symptomatology (intoxication, craving, bingeing, withdrawal). The focus of this talk is on understanding the role of the dopaminergic mesocorticolimbic circuit, and especially the prefrontal cortex, in higher-order executive dysfunction (e.g., disadvantageous decision-making such as trading a car for a couple of cocaine hits) in drug addicted individuals. The theoretical model that guides the presented research is called iRISA (Impaired Response Inhibition and Salience Attribution), postulating that abnormalities in the orbitofrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex, as related to dopaminergic dysfunction, contribute to the core clinical symptoms in drug addiction. Specifically, our multi-modality program of research is guided by the underlying working hypothesis that drug addicted individuals disproportionately attribute reward value to their drug of choice at the expense of other potentially but no-longer-rewarding stimuli, with a concomitant decrease in the ability to inhibit maladaptive drug use. In this talk I will also explore whether treatment (as usual) and 6-month abstinence enhance recovery in these brain-behavior compromises in treatment seeking cocaine addicted individuals. Promising neuroimaging studies, which combine pharmacological (i.e., oral methylphenidate, or RitalinTM) and salient cognitive tasks or functional connectivity during resting-state, will be discussed as examples for using neuroimaging for empirically guiding the development of effective neurorehabilitation strategies (encompassing cognitive reappraisal and transcranial direct current stimulation) in drug addiction.

Cases with visuospatial abnormalities provide opportunities for understanding the underlying cognitive mechanisms. Three cases of visual mirror-reversal have been reported: AH (McCloskey, 2009), TM (McCloskey, Valtonen, & Sherman, 2006) and PR (Pflugshaupt et al., 2007). This research reports a fourth case, BS -- with focal occipital cortical dysgenesis -- who displays highly unusual visuospatial abnormalities. They initially produced mirror reversal errors similar to those of AH, who -- like the patient in question -- showed a selective developmental deficit. Extensive examination of BS revealed phenomena such as: mirror reversal errors (sometimes affecting only parts of the visual fields) in both horizontal and vertical planes; subjective representation of visual objects and words in distinct left and right visual fields; subjective duplication of objects of visual attention (not due to diplopia); uncertainty regarding the canonical upright orientation of everyday objects; mirror reversals during saccadic eye movements on oculomotor tasks; and failure to integrate visual with other sensory inputs (e.g., they feel themself moving backwards when visual information shows they are moving forward). Fewer errors are produced under conditions of certain visual variables. These and other findings have led the researchers to conclude that BS draws upon a subjective representation of visual space that is structured phenomenally much as it is anatomically in early visual cortex (i.e., rotated through 180 degrees, split into left and right fields, etc.). Despite this, BS functions remarkably well in their everyday life, apparently due to extensive compensatory mechanisms deployed at higher (executive) processing levels beyond the visual modality.