Psychology seminars

In April 2021, in partnership with the UK Dementia Research Institute, the British Neuroscience Association will host its fifth Festival of Neuroscience. Due to the ongoing uncertainty around COVID19, our 2021 event will be the first ever online Festival of Neuroscience. Although we are sorry to miss meeting in person, we're excited to create a whole new Festival experience! The ambition and scope of the BNA Festivals make them unparalleled across neuroscience. Being online will not change how the BNA2021 event will: - bring together multiple organisations with an interest in brain research at a single, shared event, creating a novel, multi-organisation forum featuring all areas of fundamental research in neuroscience and psychology, from both academia and the commercial sector, plus clinical expertise in neurology and psychiatry. - include a programme of public events as well. Past Festivals have seen a rap performance about consciousness, lunchtime talks, sessions in schools, and much more.

ALBA is organizing a special event on ‘Bias in Indian STEM’ at the online conference NeuroFemIndia 2021. Prof Shubha Tole (Tata Institute of Fundamental Research), ALBA Advisor, will be moderating and leading the discussion on biases in Indian STEM academia. The panel will discuss the main biases that women and minorities in India face as they navigate the academic system. This event is part of the NeuroFemIndia Online Conference 2021.

Black Americans experience diverse racism-related stressors throughout the lifespan. Disproportionately high trauma exposure, economic disadvantage, explicit racism and inequitable treatment are stressors faced by many Black Americans. These experiences have a cumulative negative impact on psychological and physical health. However, little is understood about how experiences of racism, such as discrimination, can mediate health outcomes via their effects on neurobiology. I will present clinical, behavioral, physiological and neurobiological data from Black American participants in the Grady Trauma Project, a longstanding study of trauma conducted in inner-city Atlanta. These data will be discussed in the context of both risk and resilience/adaptation perspectives. Finally, recommendations for future clinical neuroscience research and targets for intervention in marginalized populations will be discussed.

Organisms modify their behavior in response to its consequences, a phenomenon referred to as operant learning. Contemporary modeling of this learning behavior is based on reinforcement learning algorithms. I will discuss some of the challenges that these models face, and proposed a new approach to model-selection that is based on testing their ability to engineer behavior. Finally, I will present the results of The Choice Engineering Competition – an academic competition that compared the efficacies of qualitative and quantitative models of operant learning in shaping behavior.

Across species, humans are uniquely able to acquire deep relational systems of the kind needed for mathematics, science, and human language. Analogical comparison processes are a major contributor to this ability. Analogical comparison engages a structure-mapping process (Gentner, 1983) that fosters learning in at least three ways: first, it highlights common relational systems and thereby promotes abstraction; second, it promotes inferences from known situations to less familiar situations; and, third, it reveals potentially important differences between examples. In short, structure-mapping is a domain-general learning process by which abstract, portable knowledge can arise from experience. It is operative from early infancy on, and is critical to the rapid learning we see in human children. Although structure-mapping processes are present pre-linguistically, their scope is greatly amplified by language. Analogical processes are instrumental in learning relational language, and the reverse is also true: relational language acts to preserve relational abstractions and render them accessible for future learning and reasoning. Although structure-mapping processes are present pre-linguistically, their scope is greatly amplified by language. Analogical processes are instrumental in learning relational language, and the reverse is also true: relational language acts to preserve relational abstractions and render them accessible for future learning and reasoning.

Case-control comparisons are a gold standard method for diagnosing and researching neuropsychological deficits and dissociations at the single-case level. These statistical tests, developed by John Crawford and collaborators, provide quantitative criteria for the classical concepts of deficit, dissociation and double-dissociation. Much attention has been given to the control of Type I (false positive) errors for these tests, but far less to the avoidance of Type II (false negative) errors; that is, to statistical power. I will describe the origins and limits of statistical power for case-control comparisons, showing that there are hard upper limits on power, which have important implications for the design and interpretation of single-case studies. My aim is to stimulate discussion of the inferential status of single-case neuropsychological evidence, particularly with respect to contemporary ideals of open science and study preregistration.

Constraints on control-dependent processing have become a fundamental concept in general theories of cognition that explain human behavior in terms of rational adaptations to these constraints. However, theories miss a rationale for why such constraints would exist in the first place. Recent work suggests that constraints on the allocation of control facilitate flexible task switching at the expense of the stability needed to support goal-directed behavior in face of distraction. We formulate this problem in a dynamical system, in which control signals are represented as attractors and in which constraints on control allocation limit the depth of these attractors. We derive formal expressions of the stability-flexibility tradeoff, showing that constraints on control allocation improve cognitive flexibility but impair cognitive stability. We provide evidence that human participants adapt higher constraints on the allocation of control as the demand for flexibility increases but that participants deviate from optimal constraints. In continuing work, we are investigating how collaborative performance of a group of individuals can benefit from individual differences defined in terms of balance between cognitive stability and flexibility.

State-of-the-art machine vision models can predict human recognition memory for complex scenes with astonishing accuracy. In this talk I present work that investigated how memorable scenes are actually remembered and experienced by human observers. We found that memorable scenes were recognized largely based on recollection of specific episodic details but also based on familiarity for an entire scene. I thus highlight current limitations in machine vision models emulating human recognition memory, with promising opportunities for future research. Moreover, we were interested in what observers specifically remember about complex scenes. We thus considered the functional role of eye-movements as a window into the content of memories, particularly when observers recollected specific information about a scene. We found that when observers formed a memory representation that they later recollected (compared to scenes that only felt familiar), the overall extent of exploration was broader, with a specific subset of fixations clustered around later to-be-recollected scene content, irrespective of the memorability of a scene. I discuss the critical role that our viewing behavior plays in visual memory formation and retrieval and point to potential implications for machine vision models predicting the content of human memories.

Die Covid-19-Pandemie hat viele Menschen in der Schweiz unter grossen psychischen Druck gesetzt. Wie waren die unterschiedlichen Reaktionen auf diese Einschränkungen? Wie haben sich die Veränderungen im Alltag auf den Stresspegel ausgewirkt und die Psyche beeinflusst? Am Freitag, 19. März werden wir durch die Ergebnisse der Analyse aus der «Swiss Corona Stress Study» der Universität Basel mehr erfahren.

Bilingualism and its link to cognition

Das Gehirn als Zentrale der sozialen Beziehungen und wenn es nicht mehr normal funktioniert: Darüber erfahren wir mehr am Donnerstag, 18. März. Dabei steht die Gesundheitsförderung im Fokus, ebenso, wie unser Gehirn bei Aggression tickt und was daraus für die Prävention und Behandlung folgt.

Deciding whether two different face photographs or voice samples are from the same person represent fundamental challenges within applied settings. To date, most research has focussed on average performance in these tests, failing to consider individual differences and within-person consistency in responses. In the current studies, participants completed the same face or voice matching test on two separate occasions, allowing comparison of overall accuracy across the two timepoints as well as consistency in trial-level responses. In both experiments, participants were highly consistent in their performances. In addition, we demonstrated a large association between consistency and accuracy, with the most accurate participants also tending to be the most consistent. This is an important result for applied settings in which organisational groups of super-matchers are deployed in real-world contexts. Being able to reliably identify these high performers based upon only a single test informs regarding recruitment for law enforcement agencies worldwide.

Behaviourism is dead. But what did the 'cognitive revolution' do with the leftover - the idea of 'mind' that nobody seems to want anything to do with, even philosophers. Is studying the brain the same as studying the mind ? Do you need to 'see' inside the brain to study the brain ? Or mind ? How does the tools of behaviourism help ?

If only those behaviours evolve that increase the actor’s own survival and reproductive success, then it might come as a surprise that cooperative behaviours, i.e. providing benefits to others, are a widespread phenomenon. Many animals cooperate even with unrelated individuals in various contexts, like providing care or food. One possibility to explain these behaviours is reciprocity. Reciprocal cooperation, i.e. helping those that were helpful before, is a ubiquitous and important trait of human sociality. Still, the evolutionary origin of it is largely unclear, mainly because it is believed that other animals do not exchange help reciprocally. Consequently, reciprocity is suggested to have evolved in the human lineage only. In contrast to this, I propose that reciprocity is not necessarily cognitively demanding and likely to be widespread. In my talk, I will first shed light on the mechanisms of reciprocal cooperation in Norway rats (Rattus norvegicus). In a series of studies, my colleagues and I have demonstrated that Norway rats reciprocally exchange goods and services between and within different commodities and independent of kinship. Furthermore, to understand the evolutionary origins of human reciprocity, and whether it is shared with other animals, I will then discuss evidence for reciprocity in non-human primates, which are our closest living relatives. A thorough analysis of the findings showed that reciprocity is present and, for example, not confined to unrelated individuals, but that the choice of commodities can impact the likelihood of reciprocation. Based on my findings, I conclude that reciprocal cooperation in non-human animals is present but largely neglected and not restricted to humans. In order to deepen our understanding of the evolutionary origins of reciprocity in more general, future studies should investigate when and how reciprocity in non-human animals emerged and how it is maintained.

ON YOUTUBE ab 18:30, «Das innere Leuchten», ein Dokumentarfilm von Stefan Sick. Es geht um eine menschliche und poetische Vision des täglichen Lebens von Menschen mit Demenz und ihren Betreuern. «Das innere Leuchten», ein Dokumentarfilm von Stefan Sick, konzentriert sich dabei auf positive Situationen und Begegnungen, um die Angst vor Demenz zu verringern. VIA ZOOM, eine Podiumsdiskussion ab 20:40 Auf die Vorführung folgt eine Podiumsdiskussion : sie werden Fragen an dem Regisseur, Wissenschaftler, Ärzte und Pflegepersonal stellen können.

The Brain Awareness Week by the Centre for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar spans across 7 days and invites you for a series of talks, panel discussions, competitions and workshops on topics ranging from 'Using songbirds to understand how the brain initiates movements' to 'Cognitive Science and UX in Game Design' by speakers from prestigious Indian and International institutes. Explore the marvels of the brain by joining us on 15th March. Free Registration.