Seminars

Youth sport can support growth, physical health and community, but year-round schedules, early specialization and social-media pressure can also make participation stressful. Meredith Whitley examines changes in sports culture amid rising youth mental-health difficulties and presents a seven-part framework for healthier sport environments. The lecture considers how young athletes can develop life skills while retaining enjoyment of the game. Whitley’s research includes designing and evaluating school and community sport programmes and developing US mental-health guidelines for youth sport. Speaker: Meredith Whitley, PhD, Professor of Sport-Based Youth Development at Adelphi University and Research Fellow at Stellenbosch University’s Centre for Sports Leadership. Organized by the Alan Hu Foundation. Tuesday 13 October 2026, 17:30–18:30 America/Los_Angeles (Pacific Daylight Time). Free online Zoom webinar, with a 15-minute question-and-answer segment advertised. Register using REGISTER NOW on the official lecture page at least one day beforehand to receive the Zoom link. Simultaneous Chinese and Spanish interpretation is available.

Matthew J. Girgenti discusses how research on individual brain cells and the three-dimensional organization of DNA is changing the biological understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. The seminar examines how these approaches reveal trauma-associated brain changes and identify possible targets for more effective, personalized treatments. Girgenti is a neuroscientist in Yale School of Medicine’s Department of Psychiatry. Jeffrey Borenstein moderates this Meet the Scientist session. Online via the BBRF Zoom webinar. Tuesday 13 October 2026, 14:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Follow Register Today on the organizer’s event page to the event-specific Zoom form. Advance registration is available to researchers, students, healthcare providers, mental-health organizations, patients and family members.

Lindsay N. Oberman reviews evidence for transcranial magnetic stimulation protocols in autism spectrum disorder. The seminar first explains how TMS works and how it can probe the brain mechanisms associated with autism. It then presents NIH research using repetitive TMS as an experimental therapeutic tool, examining its effects on both brain function and behaviour to guide the development of potential interventions. Online via Duke Zoom. Wednesday 7 October 2026, 16:00 EDT (America/New_York; UTC−4). Register through the event-specific Register Here link on the Duke Autism Seminar Series page to receive remote access. The presentation will not be recorded. Accommodation requests should reach the organizer at least ten days before the event. The speaker directs NIMH’s Developmental Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurostimulation Research Program.

Merav Ahissar examines how expertise emerges through learning the statistics of task-relevant stimuli. Slow learning builds familiarity with stable regularities, such as syllable patterns in language, while fast adaptation supports flexible responses to changing situations, including surprising social interactions. The talk considers atypical learning dynamics in dyslexia and autism and how these may explain difficulties in linguistic and social skill acquisition, respectively. The discussion draws on Gertsovski and Ahissar, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2026. Speaker: Merav Ahissar, Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Organized by Cornell Cognitive Science. Friday 25 September 2026, 15:00–16:30 America/New_York (EDT). Attend online through the public Join via Zoom link on the official event page; the link opens Zoom’s app and browser join options. Cornell advertises the source event as hybrid, but this listing covers the verified online attendance route.

Yuko Munakata presents evidence challenging capacity-only accounts of self-control and explains how experience, effort, and expected payoff shape executive-function engagement and later outcomes.

Rachna Reddy studies relationships among wild chimpanzees and bonobos to investigate adolescence as a period of both vulnerability and resilience. Drawing on more than a decade observing chimpanzees, the presentation brings together biological, anthropological, psychological and neuroscientific perspectives through cross-species empirical research. It connects questions about development in our closest living relatives with understanding the human life course; Reddy’s fellowship work also includes a coming-of-age novel informed by the lives of the chimpanzees she studies.

Although stress can be considered as an ongoing process that helps an organism to cope with present and future challenges, when it is too intense or uncontrollable, it can lead to adverse consequences for physical and mental health. Social stress specifically, is a highly prevalent traumatic experience, present in multiple contexts, such as war, bullying and interpersonal violence, and it has been linked with increased risk for major depression and anxiety disorders. Nevertheless, not all individuals exposed to strong stressful events develop psychopathology, with the mechanisms of resilience and vulnerability being still under investigation. During this talk, I will identify key gaps in our knowledge about stress vulnerability and I will present our recent data from our contextual fear learning protocol based on social defeat stress in mice.

Thalamic networks, at the core of thalamocortical and thalamosubcortical communications, underlie processes of perception, attention, memory, emotions, and the sleep-wake cycle, and are disrupted in mental disorders, including schizophrenia and autism. However, the underlying mechanisms of pathology are unknown. I will present novel evidence on key organizational principles, structural, and molecular features of thalamocortical networks, as well as critical thalamic pathway interactions that are likely affected in disorders. This data can facilitate modeling typical and abnormal brain function and can provide the foundation to understand heterogeneous disruption of these networks in sleep disorders, attention deficits, and cognitive and affective impairments in schizophrenia and autism, with important implications for the design of targeted therapeutic interventions

Digital platforms generate unprecedented traces of human behaviour, offering new methodological approaches to understanding collective action, polarisation, and social dynamics. Through analysis of millions of digital traces across multiple studies, we demonstrate how online behaviours predict offline action: Brexit-related tribal discourse responds to real-world events, machine learning models achieve 80% accuracy in predicting real-world protest attendance from digital signals, and social validation through "likes" emerges as a key driver of mobilization. Extending this approach to conspiracy narratives reveals how digital traces illuminate psychological mechanisms of belief and community formation. Longitudinal analysis of YouTube conspiracy content demonstrates how narratives systematically address existential, epistemic, and social needs, while examination of alt-tech platforms shows how emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust correlate with violence-legitimating discourse, with significant differences between narratives associated with offline violence versus peaceful communities. This work establishes digital traces as both methodological innovation and theoretical lens, demonstrating that computational social science can illuminate fundamental questions about polarisation, mobilisation, and collective behaviour across contexts from electoral politics to conspiracy communities.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence have led to new forms of misinformation, including highly realistic “deepfake” synthetic media. We conduct three experiments to investigate how and why retail investors react to deepfake financial news. Results from the first two experiments provide evidence that investors use a “realism heuristic,” responding more intensely to audio and video deepfakes as their perceptual realism increases. In the third experiment, we introduce an intervention to prompt analytical thinking, varying whether participants make analytical judgments about credibility or intuitive investment judgments. When making intuitive investment judgments, investors are strongly influenced by both more and less realistic deepfakes. When making analytical credibility judgments, investors are able to discern the non-credibility of less realistic deepfakes but struggle with more realistic deepfakes. Thus, while analytical thinking can reduce the impact of less realistic deepfakes, highly realistic deepfakes are able to overcome this analytical scrutiny. Our results suggest that deepfake financial news poses novel threats to investors.