Topic: individual differences

Neuroimaging has greatly extended our capacity to study the workings of the human brain. Despite the wealth of knowledge this tool has generated however, there are still critical gaps in our understanding. While tremendous progress has been made in mapping areas of the brain that are specialized for particular stimuli, or cognitive processes, we still know very little about how large-scale interactions between different cortical networks facilitate the integration of information and the execution of complex tasks. Yet even the simplest behavioral tasks are complex, requiring integration over m

Many psychoactive substances are used with the aim of altering experience, e.g. as analgesics, antidepressants or antipsychotics. These drugs act on specific receptor systems in the brain, including the opioid, serotonergic and dopaminergic systems. In this talk, I will summarise human drug studies targeting opioid receptors and their role for human experience, with focus on the experience of pain, stress, mood, and social connection. Opioids are only indicated for analgesia, due to their potential to cause addiction. When these regulations occurred, other known effects were relegated to side

Frequency tagging based on fast periodic visual stimulation (FPVS) provides a window into ongoing visual and cognitive processing and can be leveraged to measure rule learning and high-level categorization. In this talk, I will present data demonstrating highly proficient categorization as living and non-living in preschool children, and characterize the development of this ability during infancy. In addition to associating cognitive functions with development, an intriguing question is whether frequency tagging also captures enduring individual differences, e.g. in general cognitive abilities

The sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling one's own behavior and, through them, external events. Why is this subjective feeling important for humans? Is it just a by-product of our actions? Previous studies have shown that the sense of agency can affect the intensity of sensory input because we predict the input from our motor intention. However, my research has found that the sense of agency plays more roles than just predictions. It enhances perceptual processes of sensory input and potentially helps to harvest more information about the link between the external wo

SES neuroscience, using imaging and other methods, has revealed generalizations of interest for population neuroscience and the study of individual differences. But beyond its scientific interest, SES is a topic of societal importance. Does neuroscience offer any useful insights for promoting socioeconomic justice and reducing the harms of poverty? In this talk I will use research from my own lab and others’ to argue that SES neuroscience has the potential to contribute to policy in this area, although its application is premature at present. I will also attempt to forecast the ways in which p

Unfamiliar face processing (face cognition) ability varies considerably in the general population. However, the means of its assessment are not standardised, and selected laboratory tests vary between studies. It is also unclear whether 1) the most commonly employed tests are reliable, 2) participants show a degree of consistency in their performance, 3) and the face cognition tests broadly measure one underlying ability, akin to general intelligence. In this study, we asked participants to perform eight tests frequently employed in the individual differences literature. We examined the reliab

Our ability to perceive the world around us can be affected by a number of factors including the nature of the external information, prior experience of the environment, and the integrity of the underlying perceptual system. A particular challenge for the brain is to maintain a coherent perception from information encoded by the peripheral sensory organs whose function is affected by typical, developmental changes across the lifespan. Yet, how the brain adapts to the maturation of the senses, as well as experiential changes in the multisensory environment, is poorly understood. Over the past f

Common factors are omnipresent in everyday life, e.g., it is widely held that there is a common factor g for intelligence. In vision, however, there seems to be a multitude of specific factors rather than a strong and unique common factor. In my thesis, I first examined the multidimensionality of the structure underlying visual illusions. To this aim, the susceptibility to various visual illusions was measured. In addition, subjects were tested with variants of the same illusion, which differed in spatial features, luminance, orientation, or contextual conditions. Only weak correlations were o

Solutions to challenging inference problems are often subject to a fundamental trade-off between bias (being systematically wrong) that is minimized with complex inference strategies and variance (being oversensitive to uncertain observations) that is minimized with simple inference strategies. However, this trade-off is based on the assumption that the strategies being considered are optimal for their given complexity and thus has unclear relevance to the frequently suboptimal inference strategies used by humans. We examined inference problems involving rare, asymmetrically available evidence

Previous work looking at individual differences in face identity processing (FIP) has found that most commonly used lab-based performance assessments are unfortunately not sufficiently sensitive on their own for measuring performance in both the upper and lower tails of the general population simultaneously. So more recently, researchers have begun incorporating multiple testing procedures into their assessments. Still, though, the growing consensus seems to be that at the individual level, there is quite a bit of variability between test scores. The overall consequence of this is that extreme

Although analogical reasoning has been assumed to involve insight and its associated “aha!” experience, the relationship between these phenomena has never been directly probed empirically. In this study we investigated the relationship between representational change and the “aha!” experience during analogical reasoning. A novel set of verbal analogy stimuli were developed for use as an insight task. Across two experiments, participants reported significantly stronger aha moments and showed greater evidence of representational change on trials with more semantically distant analogies. Further,

In Europe, the number of people aged 65 and older is increasing dramatically, and research related to ageing is more crucial than ever. The main research dedicated to age-related changes concentrates on cognitive or sensory deficits. This is also the case in vision research. However, the majority of older adults ages without major cognitive or optical or deficits. These are foremost good news, but even in the absence of neurodegenerative or eye diseases changes in visual perception occur. It has been suggested that age-related changes are due to a general decline of cognitive, perceptual and s

A striking range of individual differences has been reported in a variety of visual search tasks, which naturally leads to the idea that some people are better at finding things than others. However, this conclusion appears to be premature. We carried out a replication of three recent visual search experiments and found that each task showed a wide range of individual differences as predicted, and observed good test-retest reliability in all three. However, performance on any one task was not correlated with the performance in the others: participants who naturally adopt efficient search strat

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 thei