Title: The integration of emotion signals from face and body

Abstract: Facial expressions provide important social information about another person and help guide our social interactions. The recognition of facial expressions is therefore critical in navigating the social world. Most previous research has studied the perception of isolated faces. However, in our everyday lives, we normally encounter faces within the context of other social signals. One of the most basic but fundamental social signals that typically accompanies facial expressions in the real world is body posture. A small but growing body of research indicates that body posture has an important contextual influence on facial expression perception, such that perception of facial expression is biased towards the body emotion. However, to date, the underlying mechanisms of this influence are not well understood. In my talk, I will describe a series of studies trying to understand the perceptual, computational, and neural mechanisms underpinning the influence of body context on facial expression perception. I will discuss findings across typical and atypical development, and in adulthood, and consider how the results can inform our understanding of social perception more generally.

Location:  2D1, Priory Road Complex

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Reading in adolescence: What do we know and what can we do?

Abstract: Despite a widespread assumption that children can read when they leave primary education, nearly 20% of adolescents are not able to read simple texts accurately and with understanding. Most research on reading has focused on children and adults, neglecting the intervening adolescent period. In this presentation, I will present research on reading development in adolescence, exploring its link to spoken vocabulary knowledge, socio-economic status and the period when students transition from primary to secondary school. I will also introduce novel approaches to promoting reading in school. Findings will be discussed in relation to their implications for theory as well as educational practice and policy.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Powerplay: Dismantling the White Patriarchal origins of robotics

Abstract: Robots are often argued to occupy a unique ontological category in the human mind, somewhere between artifact and person, somewhere between engineering and science fiction. Yet few roboticists acknowledge the way that robots grew to occupy this niche. In this talk, I will begin by describing robots' cultural origination in the White Supremacist ambitions in the 19th-century United States. After laying this groundwork, I will then describe several ways that the design and deployment of modern robots continue to reinforce White Supremacy across multiple domains of power, and the need for roboticists to adopt new theoretical lenses (both psychological and sociological) in order to better understand the implications of their design processes, and new tools of responsible design to ensure that the robots of the future are wielded as a force for good.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Health psychology in international health partnerships

Abstract: In 2013, the US Agency for International Development launched an open access journal about global health: science and practice. The editorial identified behaviour changes as the missing building block of health system strengthening. This coincided with my first visit to the African continent and my first experience of behavioural science in a health partnership context. In this talk, I will take you through the last decade of applying and researching behavioural science in partnerships between the UK and low- and middle-income countries. I will identify the challenges and propose some blue-sky visions for the future.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: A common framework for understanding working memory, task sets and language

Abstract: Human cognition requires a flexible, general-purpose representation that rapidly combines arbitrary information in a usable form. I propose a simple neural architecture that can do this, the "plastic attractor". It can act as a low-capacity buffer, a pattern completer, and as a sequence encoder. I will examine three examples of humans' flexible representation. First, working memory binds arbitrary combinations of features into objects. Second, complex se can map complex stimulus to responses after a single instruction. Third, we can fill the roles of sentences with arbitrary contents. I show how plastic attractors can explain some classical features of working memory,  attention and task sets, and can solve a major challenge in neural models of language: it can map the words in a sentence to their syntactic roles. I will show some cases in which the model agrees or disagrees with behavioural and neural data.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00‌

Title: Empathetic refutation of vaccine misconceptions

Abstract: Belief in vaccine misinformation has detrimental effects on immunisation programmes, necessitating tools to combat its influence on the public. However, the same factors that intensify beliefs in misinformation—such as a lack of trust in medical authorities—can also hinder the ability to refute it. In this talk, I will share a novel, multi-component intervention that can be used by healthcare professionals to address false or misleading anti-vaccination arguments while maintaining empathy for and understanding of people’s motivations to believe misinformation: the “Empathetic Refutational Interview” (ERI). I will talk about how we developed the intervention, from its theoretical background based on misinformation research and vaccine communication strategies, to testing it in psychological experiments with over 2,500 participants, and finally towards its implementation as a tool for healthcare professionals.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Sleep and wellbeing interventions for employees in the workplace

Abstract: Insomnia is a serious public health concern with substantial occupational health risks to the working population, with one in three workers in the UK being affected by sleep problems to some level, costing the UK economy around £36 billion every year due to loss of productivity in the workplace. This results in around 200,000 working days lost yearly with an estimated cost to industry rising steadily to £44 billion by 2030 if nothing is done about it. In this talk, I will present our latest mixed method work across two projects on preventative care and early interventions in the workplace for sleep problems and insomnia, and the development and initial testing of workplace-based psychological interventions for insomnia and wellbeing for shift work and non-shift work employees.

Bio: Dr Talar Moukhtarian is an assistant professor (research-track) at the Warwick Medical School (WMS), University of Warwick. With a PhD in Clinical Psychopathology, her research interests lie in the differential diagnosis, assessment, and treatment of mental health conditions. Her earlier research focused on adult ADHD, borderline personality disorder and transdiagnostic nosology across mental health conditions. More recently her focus has been in early interventions for mental health problems in a sustainable and scalable manner as well as novel ways of delivering interventions outside of the usual clinical settings. She’s been leading on the development and initial testing of workplace-based psychological interventions for a range of common disorders, including insomnia, depression, and anxiety.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Using digital technologies to help people reduce their alcohol consumption

Abstract: Excessive alcohol consumption is a major public health concern and contributes to health inequalities with more disadvantaged groups suffering the most harm from alcohol. Face-to-face brief interventions are effective at reducing alcohol consumption though less than 1 in 10 at-risk drinkers receive these brief interventions due to barriers such as lack of time. Digital interventions can be effective for reducing alcohol consumption. However most digital interventions that have been evaluated are websites and there is little evidence on the effectiveness of smartphone apps, especially in a UK context.

In this talk, I will cover the systematic and iterative development and refinement of the first evidence- and theory-informed alcohol reduction app, Drink Less, and the recent findings from a large randomised controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of recommending Drink Less at reducing alcohol consumption compared with usual digital care. I will discuss the implications for policy and practice, both in terms of this intervention and more broadly.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

‌

Title: A multilevel account of hippocampal function from behavior to neurons: linking spatial and concept learning through neural assemblies

Abstract: How do humans learn and organize information to form abstract knowledge? The hippocampal formation seems to be crucial for many cognitive processes including learning, memory, navigation, and concept formation, and is therefore a strong candidate for a domain-general system for organizing knowledge. But how does it work?

In the first part of my talk, I will show that a domain-general, clustering learning algorithm explains key findings in both spatial and conceptual domains. When the clustering model is applied to spatial contexts, hippocampal place cell and entorhinal grid cell-like representations arise. The same mechanism applied to conceptual tasks lead to representations aligned with conceptual knowledge. In the second part of my talk, I will present a multilevel account of this model to address how the hippocampal formation supports concept learning that bridges from behaviour, to cognitive constructs, down to the level of neurons. Inspired by algorithms that capture flocking in birds, we introduce a novel learning rule with a recurrence mechanism and propose that the hippocampus exhibits “neural flocking", where coordinated activity arises from local rules. The learning rule naturally leads to similarly-tuned neural assemblies, demonstrating how concept representations, concept cells, symbols, and their underlying neural assemblies (e.g., place-cell assemblies) in the hippocampus can form.

Location: 2D3, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Do we have to lie to use placebos?: Deceptive and open-label placebo effects on appetite and visual attention to food (cues).

Abstract: People’s attentional biases towards (depictions of) food are associated with increased craving, overeating, weight gain, and subsequent overweight and obesity. These attention biases are especially problematic in obesogenic environments where food is almost always available, and high-calorie food cues are omnipresent. Decreasing visual attention biases—especially towards high-calorie "junk foods"—is a promising approach to promoting healthy eating habits. Placebos have been shown to reduce the time people spend gazing at high-calorie food cues and the appetite for the depicted foods. However, if placebo recipients discover the deception, they may feel deceived or distrustful. This may impair the relationship between patients and healthcare providers. The deception is circumvented by open-label placebos, which are placebos without deception. Contrary to deceptive placebos, the receivers know that they receive a treatment (e.g., a pill) without an active substance. Over the past few years, open-label placebos have been investigated as a potential alternative to deceptive placebos in multiple domains: Open-label placebos have been shown to decrease pain, cancer-related fatigue or emotional distress and increase health-promoting behaviours. However, research on open-label placebo effects on appetite and visual food processing is still scarce. In our department, we investigated open-label placebo effects on appetite and the visual processing of food cues and compared these effects to deceptive placebos.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Magic Mind

Abstract: Cognitive illusions reveal a number of fascinating features about the psychology and biology of the mind; not just perception but also mental time travel, the ability to remember the past and anticipate the future. Magic effects also illuminate some important things about Theory of Mind, the ability to assess the thoughts of others, both on the part of the audience and on the part of the magician. In this talk I will evaluate the extent to which corvids, known for their impressive cognitive abilities, exploit such principles in their natural caching behaviour~ i.e., their ability to hide food from the prying eyes of their competitors and protect their caches from being pilfered. I will also investigate whether and to what extent these birds are fooled by human magic effects. Finally, I will discuss what this approach might reveal about the intersection between the ability to manually produce an action, and the ability to anticipate the actions of others: for sleight of hand magic capitalises on the observer’s predictions of specific manual movements, particularly those of the hands

Bio: Professor Nicola Clayton FRS is the Professor of Comparative Cognition in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge, UK, and Founding Director of the Cambridge Centre for the Integration of Science, Technology and Culture at the University of Cambridge. She is also Visiting Professor at the Nanging University’s Institute of Technology and Beijing University of Language and Culture, and Honorary Professor at Hangzhou Diangi University, China. She is interested in the processes of thinking with and without words, and comparisons between the cognitive abilities of corvids, cephalopods and children. She was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS) in 2010. She is also Scientist-in-Residence and associate Artist at Rambert (formerly Ballet Rambert), a position held since 2011. Her H index is 88.

Location: The Priory Lecture Theatre, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 16:00 - 17:00

Title: Mechanisms of injustice: Bridging gaps in access and treatment to address inequities for minoritised children and young people living with chronic pain

Abstract: Pain inequities are a global concern. Decades of research indicate that people from ethnic-minoritised groups consistently receive less adequate treatment for acute and chronic pain than white groups, even after controlling for age, gender, and pain intensity. In this talk, I will highlight this scholarship and discuss the experiences of children and young people living with sickle cell disease (SCD) as pain inequities are exemplified in this population. Here, I will present empirical research showing that children and young people living with SCD are labelled as “drug-seekers,” leading to the underestimation of pain, longer wait times, and inappropriate and delayed treatment. I will present findings from a recent study that calls attention to the interplay between institutional racism and procedural justice in people’s views on a pain encounter. Finally, I will discuss the Racism Exposure and Trauma Accumulation Perpetuate Pain Inequities – Advocating for Change (RESTORATIVE) model, which is a novel conceptual framework that integrates the models of racism and pain and demonstrates how the shared contribution of trauma symptoms (e.g., racism-based traumatic stress and PTSD) maintains and perpetuates chronic pain for racialised groups. I will utilise the RESTORATIVE model to describe specific, actionable steps to mitigate trauma and injustice.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Brain-body interactions in paediatric populations

Abstract: The central nervous system of infants and toddlers develops tremendously in the first years after birth. This development is pivotal to reaching certain milestones early in life, such as learning to walk and talk. Being born prematurely can jeopardise this and comes with challenges as the nervous system is exposed to stimuli it would not have encountered whilst in-utero. In the first part of the talk, I will discuss one of these challenges which is apnoea of prematurity – a developmental disorder affecting the lungs and brain. However, the majority of infants can be considered typically developing. In the second part, I will focus on typically developing toddlers learn to walk from a neural perspective.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: On the same wavelength: interbrain synchronization during eye-contact

Abstract: Recent studies show that when people communicate, their brains synchronize; this process is called interbrain synchronization. The higher the synchrony between two brains, the more effectively they communicate. The interest in how people’s brains synchronize is not new, but we have only recently been able to monitor two or more brains simultaneously, through a technique called hyper scanning. In this talk, I will present evidence from hyper scanning studies that interbrain synchronization increases during mutual eye-contact and explore what is the biological significance of such synchronization. Furthermore, as we move our social interactions online, mutual eye-contact is no longer possible due to the positioning of webcams. Looking at the participant’s eyes on the screen means that your own gaze appears averted. In this talk, I will also present preliminary data from my lab showing what happens to interbrain synchronization during online eye-contact and how the use of an eye-gaze correction device affected online interbrain synchronization and collaborative creativity.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Identifying intuitive interactions for remote visuomotor control

Abstract: Human interaction with the world is increasingly mediated by interfaces that control tools remotely: computer mice control cursors, joysticks control drones, and levers control robots. When using remote tools, the direct physical interaction we typically have with the world is broken. We move in a different workspace to the tool, we do not use our own limbs to interact with the relevant surroundings, and thus we cannot feel and experience the properties of the objects we interact with. Ultimately, the presence of the mediating interface that is inherent in remote tool use introduces complex relationships between the user and the tool. The implications of this for visuomotor learning and control remain poorly understood. In this talk, I will introduce a novel control system which seeks to understand what factors effect visuomotor learning rate in remote tool use.

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Is Psychology Colonial? Possibilities and challenges for creating other ways of doing research from the Global South

Abstract: This seminar will address the colonial characteristics of psychology. Based on Participatory Action Research experiences with people living in poverty, indigenous communities and immigrants in various Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru), the speaker, James Moura (Associate Professor at the University of the International Integration of Afro-Brazilian Lusophony in Brazil and Senior Research Associate at the University of Bristol), will present decolonial strategies for making Psychology indeed structured for the needs of the Majority World.

Location: 2D3, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Measuring individual differences in interoception

Abstract:  Interoception is described as the perception of the internal state of one’s body and includes sensations such as cardiac or respiratory signals. Despite great interest in interoception, there remains uncertainty regarding the measurement and conceptualization of interoception, as well as its relationship with health and higher order cognition. This talk will provide an overview of work that has scrutinised the measurement of interoception and sought to develop solutions to the challenges of interoception measurement that may be used to understand the relevance of interoception for health and cognition. Together these findings suggest that interoception is a multifaceted construct with relevance for health and cognition, though further work is required to adequately measure individual differences in interoceptive ability.

Location: 2D3, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Taking possession of the mind:  the surprising phenomena of Immersion

Abstract: Humans are easily distracted and often struggle to stick to the task at hand.  However, under certain circumstances - for example when we watch film, television, or live theatre - we can become completely immersed. Time passes unnoticed, we become unaware of our surrounding, and we might even forget to eat and drink.

We have developed a set of methods to study the moment-by-moment fluctuations in immersion when participants watch television, film and live theatre.  Although our work has highlighted the importance of the perceptual quality of the experience, it also highlights the importance of the narrative as a major determinant of the extent of immersion for these types of content. 

Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00

Title: Using digital technologies to help people reduce their alcohol consumption

Abstract: Excessive alcohol consumption is a major public health concern and contributes to health inequalities with more disadvantaged groups suffering the most harm from alcohol. Face-to-face brief interventions are effective at reducing alcohol consumption though less than 1 in 10 at-risk drinkers receive these brief interventions due to barriers such as lack of time. Digital interventions can be effective for reducing alcohol consumption. However most digital interventions that have been evaluated are websites and there is little evidence on the effectiveness of smartphone apps, especially in a UK context.

In this talk, I will cover the systematic and iterative development and refinement of the first evidence- and theory-informed alcohol reduction app, Drink Less, and the recent findings from a large randomised controlled trial evaluating the effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of recommending Drink Less at reducing alcohol consumption compared with usual digital care. I will discuss the implications for policy and practice, both in terms of this intervention and more broadly.

 Location: 2D1, Priory Road Complex 

Time: 13:00 - 14:00