The observation that powerful situations shape human cognition, motivation, emotion, and behaviour is a central theme in social psychology in the classic tradition of Kurt Lewin. This presentation will take you on a journey across my 25-year program of research in the Lewinian tradition investigating how powerful situations shape the plasticity of people’s attitudes, beliefs, and their self-concept in response to seemingly small nudges in local environments. What features of situations are particularly potent in shifting social behaviour? In what domains and on what outcomes? Through what mechanisms? How durable is the impact? These are questions we ask. Our focus is to answer these questions by designing situations that promote inclusion and reduce exclusion across two branches of research: How powerful situations affect self-perceptions and perceptions of outgroups. This presentation will give you a peek into what we have learned in the past 25 years.
Chronic stress is a significant contributor to both physical and mental ill health and childhood adversity, often an underlying cause of processes involved in the development of chronic stress, is a well known transdiagnostic risk factor for conditions such as depression and schizophrenia.
A growing body of research shows that bilingual experience, and crucially the degree of engagement with that experience, affects domain-general neurocognitive outcomes, including attentional control and task switching and their neural underpinnings (e.g., Carter et al., 2023; Kałamała et al., 2022; Pereira Soares et al., 2022; Timmer et al., 2017). I will present a recent proposal of bilingualism induced neurocognitive adaptations developed in my lab, the Unified Bilingual Experience Trajectories (UBET) framework (DeLuca et al., 2020), and data that tests its predictions. The first study shows how individual differences in bilingual experience such as intensity and diversity of bilingual language use as well as duration of bilingual language usage are related to structural brain measures associated with executive control. Two electroencephalographic studies show how individual difference measures lead to functional brain changes in cognitive control paradigms that test interference suppression (flanker and Simon task; Carter et al., 2023) and task switching (color shape and number-letter task; DeLuca et al., in prep). Taken together, the data largely support the UBET model. Interestingly, though, functional brain changes do not always lead to behavioural changes in cognitive control tasks, suggesting that bilingual experiences lead to differences in the engagement of cognitive control mechanisms without necessarily leading to a previously proposed ‘bilingual advantage’.
https://psychology.hku.hk/people/hu-xiaoqing/
https://www.uu.nl/staff/LCSternheim
https://research.tees.ac.uk/en/persons/judith-eberhardt
https://psychology.fsu.edu/person/david-braithwaite
https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/34105-daniel-bush
The storage and processing of data uses energy, and therefore has a carbon footprint. This footprint is likely to increase in coming years given increased adoption of machine learning techniques for analysis. In this session, I'll discuss how computing leads to carbon emissions, and what can be done to reduce your personal research computing footprint.
Presentation 1: Negotiating complexity under threat: evidence from a virtual environment, Aaron LaycockPresentation 2: When seeing human is believing human: An adaptation of Milgram’s Cyranoids, Scarlett SymePresentation 3: Updating, Shifting and Eye-Blink Rate in Aging: A Comparison of Multiple Sclerosis Patients and Healthy Aging (online), Evgeniadou NenaPresentation 4: The neural mechanism behind ASMR, Josephine Flockton
Presentation 1: Task Complexity and the Efficacy of Spaced Retrieval Practice, Ewan MurrayPresentation 2: The Oscillatory Mechanisms Supporting the Processing of Lexically Ambiguous Words, Vanessa KellerLanguage contains substantial ambiguity at several linguistic levels, including sound, structure, and meaning. One type of ambiguity that is ubiquitous in English concerns the meanings of individual words, whereby a single word form (e.g., bark) can refer to multiple distinct concepts. However, when we process language during conversation and when reading texts, we do not routinely struggle to disambiguate the words we encounter and are largely unaware of the alternative possible meanings for any given word, despite psycholinguistic evidence showing that we transiently activate all available meanings. While behavioural and event-related-potential studies have mapped out the time course of the activation of available meanings during the processing of ambiguous words, to date there has been no work investigating the oscillatory dynamics underpinning that process. I will present data from an EEG study that aimed to address this gap by looking at the role of neural oscillations in the comprehension of lexical-semantic ambiguity. Our pre-registered analyses focussed on theta oscillations (~3-8 Hz), which have been implicated in lexical-semantic processing during language comprehension and are generally regarded as a signature of lexical access. Beyond language processing, theta activity has also been linked to successful memory encoding. We used an experimental design that allowed us to disentangle these two purported roles of theta, investigating on the one hand the hypothesised involvement of theta oscillations in the processing of lexical-semantic ambiguity and on the other hand addressing the prediction that increased theta activity should be associated with better memory for linguistic input. I will discuss our findings in the context of previous work from the psycholinguistic and memory literatures and consider how they inform current theories of human language comprehension.Presentation 3: The Neuromarkers of the Successful Startup Founders, Irena Danilovska
Presentation 1: Mind-wandering during reading, Chen ChenPresentation 2: The impact of the semantic content of L1 and L2 maskers on L1 target transcription, Emily RicePresentation 3: Schema-effects in Temporal Order Memory, Adam Curtis
Anna Crossland, Hannah Kirsop, Lauren Charters, Trish Chinzara
Dr Flavio Azevedo, Utrecht University
Professor Jay van Bavel, New York University
Professor Martin Pickering, University of Edinburgh
Dr Guillaume Rousselet, University of Glasgow
Dr Alexandra Woolgar, University of Cambridge
Professor Beth Jefferies, University of York
Professor Padraic Monaghan, Lancaster University
Liz Wands-Murray, University of York
Dr Lisa Feldman Barrett, Northeastern University
Professor Maria Wimber, University of Glasgow
Ayanna Thomas, Tufts University
David Zendle, University of York
Dr Laura Batterink, Western University, Canada