Departmental internal seminars

Change the Wallpaper: Social psychological interventions to reduce bias and increase inclusion

1.00PM, Online

Professor Nilanjana Dasgupta

Understanding stress: brain, body and mind

 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.

Neurocognitive adaptations to bilingual experience

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’.

Memory editing during sleep: mechanisms, clinical applications and technological innovationsTitle TBC

https://psychology.hku.hk/people/hu-xiaoqing/

Exploration and Learning in Curious Infants

Intolerance of Uncertainty in Eating Disorders: what do we know and what do we not know (yet)?

https://www.uu.nl/staff/LCSternheim

Health Psychology and Participatory Research: Empowering Communities to Address Health Inequalities

https://research.tees.ac.uk/en/persons/judith-eberhardt

Logical Reasoning in Math: Cognitive Processes and Individual Differences

https://psychology.fsu.edu/person/david-braithwaite

Investigating the effects of COVID-19 and long COVID on the brain

Human Hippocampal Mechanisms of Goal-directed Navigation

https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/34105-daniel-bush

How to reduce the carbon footprint of your research computing

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.

PhD Talks: Cognition and Emotion

Presentation 1: Negotiating complexity under threat: evidence from a virtual environment, Aaron Laycock Presentation 2: When seeing human is believing human: An adaptation of Milgram’s Cyranoids, Scarlett Syme Presentation 3: Updating, Shifting and Eye-Blink Rate in Aging: A Comparison of Multiple Sclerosis Patients and Healthy Aging (online), Evgeniadou Nena Presentation 4:  The neural mechanism behind ASMR, Josephine Flockton

PhD Talks: Memory / Cognitive Neuroscience

Presentation 1: Task Complexity and the Efficacy of Spaced Retrieval Practice, Ewan Murray Presentation 2: The Oscillatory Mechanisms Supporting the Processing of Lexically Ambiguous Words, Vanessa Keller Language 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

PhD Talks

Presentation 1: Mind-wandering during reading, Chen Chen Presentation 2: The impact of the semantic content of L1 and L2 maskers on L1 target transcription, Emily Rice Presentation 3: Schema-effects in Temporal Order Memory, Adam Curtis

PHD Talks: Mechanisms of Mental Health / Developmental Psychology

Anna Crossland, Hannah Kirsop, Lauren Charters, Trish Chinzara

PhD Talks: Neuroimaging (Language / Perception)

tbc

Gradients of Semantic Cognition

Professor Beth Jefferies, University of York

Considering Conflicting Goals in the Classroom: How Student Manage Emotional Wellbeing When Learning Under Pressure

Ayanna Thomas, Tufts University

The Smart Data Donation Service: Infrastructure and Data for Understanding Digital Lives

David Zendle, University of York

Using video games to study Psychology

N/A

The Way I Make You Feel: Unpicking the Features, Processes, and Consequences of Interpersonal Emotion Regulation

Michaela Gummerum, University of Warwick

The Development of Integrative Perception from Infancy to Adulthood

Dr Sagi Jaffe-Dax, Tel Aviv University

Sleep spindles: A mediator of adaptive memory consolidation and a biomarker for mental illness

Dr Dan Denis, University of York

Perceiving in a Blink of an Eye, Its Role in Visual Awareness and Why One Should Care

Dr Karla Evans, University of York

Can we tell what audiences are thinking without asking them?

Dr Nick Barraclough, University of York

Your brain without sleep: a fast-track to anxiety

Dr Scott Cairney, University of York

Building Word and World Knowledge from Everyday Experiences

Dr Layla Unger, University of York

cancelled

cancelled

Prevalence of Omnicidal Tendencies

Professor Rob Jenkins, University of York

PhD Talks

Alex Mepham, Boon Toh

PhD Talks

Sophie Marshall, Charlotte Knapper

PhD Talks

Naveen Hanif, Noel Lam

PhD Talks

Kira Noad, Bee Quinn, Kirralise Hansford

Mind-mindedness: Predicting development into early adulthood

Professor Liz Meins, University of York

PhD Talks

Erin Warden-English, Lydia Munns, Robert Brennan

The old and the new: language comprehension and recent experience

Professor Gareth Gaskell, University of York

The devil you don't know: Threat and uncertainty in complex environments

Dr Cade Mc Call, University of York

The long road to proficiency with fractions: insights from early fraction understanding

Prof Silke Goebel, University of York

When my body is not my own: the psychology of perinatal body changes

Dr Catherine Preston, University of York

This weeks talk has been cancelled

This weeks talk has been cancelled

The third visual pathway in cognition and disease

Dr David Pitcher, University of York

Cognitive Listening: Bridging the gap between speech science and cognitive psychology

Professor Sven Mattys, University of York

Face recognition, Individuality and ID

Professor Mike Burton, University of York

PhD Talks

Natasha Baxter, Daniel Rogers, Alex Mepham

Who are the children with reading comprehension difficulties, and why does it matter?

Dr Emma James, University of York

PhD Talks

Federico Segala, Emily Madden, Lydia Searle

PhD Talks

Emma Sullivan, Emma Jackson

PhD Talks - Cancelled

Emily Madden, Lydia Searle

The development of goal-directed behaviour: learning the consequences of actions

Dr MaryAnn Noonan, University of York

Ingroup bias or preference for higher status? Two routes from groups to attitude

Dr Lusine Grigoryan, University of York

The development of goal-directed behaviour: learning the consequences of actions

Dr MaryAnn Noonan, University of York