Psychology Research Seminar Series

• More than 50 years ago, the so-called Concealed Information Test (CIT) was developed as an alternative to the heavily criticized polygraph that is still frequently applied in criminal investigations around the world. Instead of detecting lying, the CIT aims at uncovering memory for crime-related details. Traditionally, measures of the autonomic nervous system were used for this purpose but in recent years, a wide variety of different behavioural, oculomotor and neuroscientific methods has been applied in scientific research on the CIT. I am going to summarize these novel applications and I will specifically focus on the possible advantages and drawbacks that are associated with these methods. Instead of searching for the application that yields the highest predictive validity in detecting concealed knowledge, research should focus more strongly on the cognitive and affective mechanisms that underlie the CIT and can be uncovered by a strategic combination of different research approaches. This would allow for improving the construct validity of the CIT and may help to facilitate the well-informed choice of methods for specific applications in criminal investigations.
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• The effect of frequency on language acquisition and production in children with typical development (TD) has been of great recent interest. Work has shown that frequency exerts effects across a variety of language phenomena, often producing faster, more accurate, and more efficient learning and processing of frequent compared to infrequent words, phrases, and constructions. In this talk, I focus on how frequency affects the language production of children with developmental language disorder (DLD). Children with DLD have difficulty understanding and producing language that cannot be explained by hearing impairment, intellectual disability, or other overt neurological/cognitive impairments. I describe three studies that examine whether 4-5-year-old children with DLD differ from children with TD in their overall response to frequency in language production tasks at three different levels: the single-word level, the multiword level, and the paradigm level. I relate the findings to different models of frequency response, asking which best explains how children with DLD use frequency at these different levels. I end by asking whether these patterns might point the way toward other ways to examine the contribution of frequency to language disorders and their treatment.
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• Over the last decade, there has been a rapid development of new forms of non-invasive brain stimulation that allow direct examination of the influence that one cortical area exerts over another anatomically connected area. These techniques, often referred to as paired-pulse transcranial magnetic stimulation (ppTMS) techniques, involve the application of pairs of TMS pulses over two brain areas at short intervals. When this is done repeatedly over a period of time, it is also possible to selectively manipulate associative neural plasticity between the two brain regions, strengthening or weakening the physiological influence of one brain area over the other. The evoked effects have been defined as Hebbian in nature. In this talk I will present a series of investigations that have used ppTMS alone, and in combination with neuroimaging techniques, to directly examine the relationship between neural plasticity, functional connectivity and frequency coupling within areas of the motor and visual human cortices.
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• Youth can play a central role in promoting positive intergroup relations and tackling social inequalities in conflict and divided societies. The peacebuilding potential of youth, however, remains relatively under-explored in the research literature on social change and collective action. Drawing on theoretical models including the empathy-attitudes-action model, social identity theory and intergroup contact theory, I will present an ongoing programme of research that focuses on understanding more about how, when, and why youth engage in or demonstrate positive intentions towards constructive actions- at the interpersonal, collective, and structural levels. In doing so, I consider the importance of individual and contextual factors in promoting constructive action amongst youth as well as reflect on the implications of this research for current scientific understanding and practice.
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• Time provides essential structure to human experience. People tend to talk about time using spatial concepts of distance and quantity (Casasanto & Boroditsky, 2008). This tendency exhibits considerable crosslinguistic variation. In English and Swedish, distance metaphors are typically used to convey duration (i.e., long time/lång tid). In Greek and Spanish, duration is commonly expressed through quantity metaphors (i.e. poli ora/mucho tiempo, ‘much time’). Previous research shows that these language-specific tendencies to talk about time as distance or quantity affect the psychophysical experience of duration in speakers of these languages (Casasanto, 2008). The current set of studies tests the scope of such effects of language mediation. Results from a psychophysical duration estimation task, where stimulus duration conflicted with its physical growth, showed that when reproducing duration, Swedish speakers were misled by stimulus length, and Spanish speakers were misled by stimulus size/quantity. However, language interference was confined to difficult discriminations (i.e., when stimuli varied only subtly in duration and growth), and was eliminated when linguistic cues were removed from the task. Critically, Spanish-Swedish bilinguals performing the task in both languages showed different interference depending on language-specific contextual cues, and individual differences emerged as a function of frequency of language use and age of onset of bilingualism. These findings, interpreted under an associative learning account, reveal the malleable nature of representation as part of a highly adaptive computational system, where language can serve as a powerful cue in transforming humans’ experience of time.
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• In fields such as electroencephalography (EEG), in which experiments result in rich datasets, with thousands of data points, there are infinite acceptable ways to process and analyze this data, resulting in an enormous 'garden of forking paths'. In this talk, several questions that arise from this issue will be explored, on the example of two studies - a systematic review of methodology decisions and reporting in N400 experiments, and a multiverse analysis of the same N400 dataset using 14 different analysis pipelines. While we will focus on one subdomain of EEG - event-related potentials, and more specifically the N400, similar issues have been observed in other fields of EEG, and neuroscience more broadly. The questions we will discuss include: (1) how good are researchers in describing their path through the garden of forking paths to the degree that other researchers can replicate their procedure; (2) what are the points where improvements in reporting are necessary; (3) how much are the processing and analysis pipelines found in literature comparable to each other when similar approach can be expected; (4) what are the points of divergence in methodological decisions and what information we can use as a basis for a priori decisions in future studies; (5) can these diverse pipelines lead to different study outcomes when applied to the same dataset; (6) how often do researchers deviate from published guidelines for good practice; (7) what are the decisions where deviations from the guidelines are the most common?
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• Recent studies show that chimpanzees expect others to search for objects of interest where others think (correctly or incorrectly) the objects are hidden. According to prevailing models, chimpanzees make such predictions by metarepresenting others’ beliefs. In my talk, I discuss a recent study we conducted with chimpanzees that investigated the simpler belief-simulation model. In this model, chimpanzees predict where another agent will search for an object of interest by simulating (imaginatively adopting) what the other agent believes about the location of the object. The belief-simulation model predicts that chimpanzees should behave as if they share the other agent’s belief about the object’s location, even in cases where the other agent’s belief is false. We tested this by giving chimpanzees a novel search paradigm and measured where they searched for buried food. Our results show that chimpanzees display a bias in their search behavior predicted by the simulation model and may use belief simulation, rather than metarepresentation, when predicting where others will search for objects of interest.
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• In 1967, Peterson and Beach reviewed more than 160 experiments about people’s statistical intuitions and introduced the view of “man as an intuitive statistician.” Tversky and Kahneman (1974) rejected this conclusion and proposed that people use heuristics that are prone to bias. With that, they introduced the heuristics-and-biases program, which has profoundly altered how the behavioural sciences view the mind’s competences and rationality. How was this radical transformation possible? We analyze 604 experiments and conclude that the heuristics-and-biases program established a new experimental protocol with a strong emphasis on described scenarios that replaced the prior emphasis on learning and experience.

17 February 2021, Sarah Schäfer, Universität Trier, How to Create a Network of Importance: a (non-social) Investigation of the Adaptivity of the Self-concept

• Undisputed is the effect of stimuli which are anyhow related to one’s personal self: my name, my home town, a picture of my favourite pullover…each of these things can hardly be ignored by me while they are completely irrelevant for others. However, we do not yet understand, how exactly such stimuli affect us, or, in other words, in which way they influence our cognitive processes. Embedded in a variety of research aiming at a deeper understanding of how self-related stimuli influence cognitive processing, we set out to investigate the way stimuli become self-related. Thus, we conducted various studies to test how stimuli can be associated with the self, whether these self-associations are simple or rather complex, whether they can also be prevented once the to-be-associated content could be negative for the self and whether the building of self-associations can be located in the brain. The results of these studies will be integrated to try to give a definition of a particular component of the self and conclusions will be discussed about what this can tell about the way self-related stimuli influence cognitive processing.

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• Much of the research on face perception and recognition has been conducted using strictly controlled stimuli and procedures which cannot fully represent our everyday social interactions and recognition experiences. Here, we focus on two distinct areas of face research and discuss the importance of sampling natural variability and integrating information across different modalities. First, we explore social person evaluation where, over a series of experiments, we investigate the relative contribution of facial and vocal information for social judgments: dominance and trustworthiness. Our results show that information contained in both the face and the voice contributes to first impression formation. Their integration is, to some degree, outside conscious control, and the weighting of channel contribution varies according to the trait being perceived. Next, we focus on person recognition in applied settings – searching for target identities in a highly complex environment, security CCTV. We use real surveillance footage from a large city transport hub, allowing us to establish the general principles for search efficiency within this realistic context. Our findings highlight the importance of access to natural, within-person variability which contributes to our growing understanding of its role in face perception and recognition.

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• We introduce the CAL model (Category Abstraction Learning), a cognitive framework formally describing category learning built on similarity-based generalization, dissimilarity-based abstraction, two attention learning mechanisms, error-driven knowledge structuring and stimulus memorization. Our hypotheses draw on an array of empirical and theoretical insights connecting reinforcement and category learning, and working memory. The key novelty of the model is its explanation of how rules are learned from scratch based on three central assumptions. (1) Category rules emerge from two processes of stimulus generalization (similarity) and its direct inverse (category contrast) on independent dimensions. (2) Two attention mechanisms guide learning by focusing on rules, or on the contexts in which they produce errors. (3) Knowing about these contexts inhibits executing the rule, without correcting it, and consequently leads to applying partial rules in different situations. We show that the model decisively outperforms the established category-learning models ALCOVE (Kruschke, 1992), SUSTAIN (Love, Medin & Gureckis, 2004) and ATRIUM (Erickson & Kruschke, 1998) on data sets from benchmark studies, including cross-validations based on trial-wise eye-movements. We illustrate the model's explanatory scope by simulating several phenomena (peak shift, instruction effects, extrapolation), which were so far unexplained (or unexplained within a single model). We discuss CAL's relation to existing accounts, and its promise in understanding the role of attention control and working memory in category learning and related domains. Manuscript pre-print: https://psyarxiv.com/4jukw/

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• Neuropsychological functions (memory, processing speed, general intellectual function, etc) are vulnerable to early brain injury associated with neonatal encephalopathy (NE) following perinatal asphyxia/ hypoxic ischaemic encephalopathy (oxygen starvation and or lack of blood supply to the brain during birth), even in children not developing cerebral palsy (CP). Therapeutic hypothermia (TH), or inducing controlled hypothermia in new-borns, has become the standard treatment for NE. The incidence of CP is reduced but the impact on neuropsychological functions, and subsequent development has been relatively unexplored. Longer term follow-up of apparently unimpaired children is lacking. In a series of studies that I present here, we aimed to determine level of function (cognitive, motor and behavioural) in TH-treated survivors of NE, without CP, compared with those of matched control children at 6–8 years. Differences were found which will be presented in this seminar. We conclude that TH is a remarkable and radical treatment that drastically reduces the effects of early life brain injury, but it is not a total fix. School-age children without CP cooled for HIE still have reduced cognitive and motor performance and more emotional difficulties than their peers, strongly supporting the need for school-age assessments. Within the presentation various neuropsychological models of infant and child brain development will be touched upon, together with clinical case material and general paediatric neuropsychology principles. The seminar should appeal to clinically interested, and/ or research oriented persons alike.

20 November 2019, Dr Trudi Edginton, City University London, Integrating mindfulness and compassion into community, clinical and workplace settings: A Cognitive Neuroscience Approach

• Dr Trudi Edginton is a Clinical Psychologist, Senior Lecturer and Co-founder of the Centre of Excellence in Mindfulness Research at City, University of London. This talk will focus on the applications of mindfulness and compassion in a range of community, workplace and clinical settings from a cognitive neuroscience perspective. Dr Edginton will discuss her clinical research on assessing and responding to cognitive and emotional difficulties in individuals with Dementia, Traumatic Brain Injury, Hydrocephalus and Spina bifida and the development of tailored mindfulness interventions. This talk will focus on the neurobiological mechanisms that underpin the measurable physiological changes associated with mindfulness and compassion. The importance of highlighting the limitations and the wider societal implications of integrating mindfulness interventions across these settings will also be discussed. Finally there will be a focus on the development of innovative approaches to mindfulness-based interventions to address the need for improving access to mindfulness across the lifespan in a range of culturally diverse settings.
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13 November 2019, Dr Jeremy Tree, Swansea University, How do you solve a problem like phonological dyslexia? A new approach to an old issue

• Following brain injury, patients can present with various kinds of acquired dyslexia - and these can be particularly specific to certain kinds of letter strings. Back in the late 1970's patients were first reported who seemed to do very badly at reading nonwords (novel words) despite being very able to read familiar words of various kinds; a condition dubbed 'Phonological dyslexia' (Beauvois & Derouesne, 1979). But an issue has always remained. How does one determine nonword reading accuracy, which there may well be no pre-accepted response? The implications of this issue have dogged the interpretation of data that interrogates current model/theories of reading over the years - in some cases enabling the convenient ignoring of contrary cases (e.g., Tree & Kay, 2008). In this talk, I explain the historical approaches to dealing with this challenge and their weaknesses - and then present a case series of dementia patients tested on nonword reading that provides a new (database driven) approach. I argue that phonological dyslexia is perhaps best characterised on a continuum of severity, rather than the more binary approach of the past.
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6 November 2019, Dr Stephen Minton, University of Plymouth, Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples

• This seminar relates to my recently published book, ‘Residential Schools and Indigenous Peoples: From Education via Genocide to the Possibilities for Truth, Restitution, Reconciliation and Reclamation’ (Routledge, October 23rd, 2019). The book provides an extended multi-country focus on the transnational phenomenon of the genocide of Indigenous peoples through residential schooling. It brought together Indigenous and non-indigenous authors from Aotearoa / New Zealand, Australia, Greenland, Ireland, Norway, the United Kingdom and the United States in telling the stories of what happened to Indigenous children, who from the late nineteenth century were removed from their families and communities in order to be ‘educated’ away from their ‘savage’ backgrounds, into the ‘civilised’ ways of the colonising societies, in the residential schools. The book examines the immediate and legacy effects that residential schooling had on Indigenous children and peoples; how such systems of education were legitimised, and positioned as benevolent, by the colonising societies; and the possibilities that exist now for Indigenous and non-Indigenous agency in processes of truth, restitution, reconciliation and reclamation. In the seminar itself, we will focus on the collaborative processes involved in writing the book, and outline the principle findings. Like the book itself, it is anticipated that the seminar will appeal to academics, researchers and postgraduate students within the fields of (especially developmental and social) psychology, sociology, Indigenous studies, the history of education and comparative education.
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30 October 2019, Dr Cesco Willemse, Italian Institute of Technology, Genova, Robots as an opportunity to study social cognition in humans

• Brain Injury Case Managers (BICMs) work closely with individuals with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI), assessing needs, structuring rehabilitation interventions and providing support, and have significant experience of clients with impairments to decision-making. This study explored the application of the Mental Capacity Act (MCA) and its guidance when applied to ABI survivors. This research aimed to 1) highlight potential conflicts or tensions that application of the MCA might pose and 2) identify approaches to mitigate the problems of the MCA and capacity assessments with ABI survivors. It is hoped this will support improvements in the services offered. Using a mixed method approach, 93 BICMs responded to an online questionnaire about decision-making following ABI. Of these, 12 BICMs agreed to take part in a follow-up semi-structured telephone interview. The data revealed four main themes: disagreements with other professionals, hidden disabilities, vulnerability in the community and implementation of the MCA and capacity assessments. The findings highlight the need for changes to the way mental capacity assessments are conducted and the need for training for professionals in the hidden effects of ABI. Limited research exists on potential limitations of the application of the MCA for individuals with an ABI. This study provides much needed research on the difficulties surrounding mental capacity and ABI.
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• Perception seems so simple. I look out of the window to see houses, trees, people walking past, the sky above, the grass below. I hear birds in the trees, cars going past, the distant sound of an alarm. The world is full of objects that make their presence known to me through my senses – what could be more simple? Yet the efficacy of perceptual experience hides a host of questions for which we do not yet have the answers.
  Information reaching our senses is generally incomplete, ambiguous, distributed in space and time and not neatly sorted according to its source, so a key function of our perceptual systems is to discover the likely causes of our sensations. Perception as inference or hypothesis testing, formalised in the predictive coding theory, offers an attractive framework for exploring these issues. From this perspective, regularities or patterns provide perceptual systems with some traction, allowing the formation of expectations and a basis for decomposing the world into discrete objects.
  But in the dynamic world which we inhabit, object representations must be similarly dynamic and need to form and dissolve, dominate and yield, in a way that facilitates veridical perception. In this talk, I will discuss auditory scene analysis in the context of predictive coding using experimental data, exemplar models, and the phenomenon of perceptual multistability.

• Neuroimaging and neurostimulation tools have reshaped the landscape of psychology research. Despite, or perhaps because of, their tremendous popularity the development of core fMRI, EEG, MEG, TMS, and tCS functionality has all but halted.
  Instead, the advances of tomorrow seem to be made on a myriad of far-out fronts. In this talk I would like to present a small and humble selection of recent advances in these fields: 1) multi-band multi-echo fMRI acquisition, 2) unified cross-species MRI analysis, and 3) a novel tool to achieve non-invasive deep brain neuromodulation with high precision: transcranial focused ultrasound.
  Following the main talk, I would like to invite a discussion on the future of neurostimulation and neuroimaging, focussing both on technological advances and on opportunities created by changing culture, including open-science and machine-learning approaches.

• Attentional processing is at the heart of human learning, since there exists a very clear reciprocal relationship: as we start to learn about the world, our attention is biased in interesting ways, and these attentional biases affect how we learn in the future. In this talk I will describe recent work exploring the role of uncertainty in guiding attention and learning.
  These data suggest an important distinction should be made between "expected" and "unexpected" uncertainty. When we expect a certain level of uncertainty, we appear to be less vigilant to changes in our environment, and hence learning occurs more slowly. In contrast, the sudden onset of uncertainty appears to engage both attention and learning. I will discuss how these effects might be handled by classic models of associative learning

• The neural basis of decision-making has recently become one of the central topics in systems and cognitive neuroscience. In this talk, I will discuss our recent progress in understanding the neural correlates of value-based decision making in humans and non-human primates.
  I will illustrate that a multimodal approach which brings together computational modelling, neuroimaging and neurostimulation can be used to identify distributed networks associated with decision making while at the same time provide causal and mechanistic evidence for the functional contribution of the brain regions comprising these networks.

• The talk will assess how behaviour change intervention is impacting on health, health care and health policy. It will consider how we might develop behaviour change research so as to optimise applied impact. Co-creation of interventions will be highlighted in order to ensure acceptability, sustainability and effectiveness in practice.
  The talk will illustrate how better use can be made of available scientific evidence in relation to information provision, persuasive communication and behavioural regulation, drawing on the Information Motivation Behavioural Skills Model.
  It will be argued that an experimental approach to identifying modifiable regulatory process and selecting change techniques is foundational to effective behaviour change design. This will be considered in light of the reflective impulsive model of behavioural regulation.
  The importance of process evaluation of interventions will be emphasised and the use of meta-analyses to retrospectively identify modifiable processes and intervention features associated with effectiveness will be discussed. Finally NUDGEs will be briefly discussed.

03 October 2018, Dr Maggie Brennan, University of Plymouth, “We can’t arrest our way out of this”. Challenges, Requirements and “what works” in the management and prevention of online child sexual offending behaviour.

• The representation of the body in the brain (how our body feels to us) is built on sensory information and prior expectations, the experience of which is only accessible to each individual.
  How sensory information modifies (or fails to modify) prior expectations and vice versa – may be the key to understanding a range of body representation disorders in which the body perceived by the individual is very different from reality.
  Unexpected body representations that challenge prior expectations and/or modify sensory perception are relatively easy to induce in most healthy individuals, but can these techniques be utilised in clinical populations to help those with distorted body representations?

2 May 2018, Professor Harold Bekkering, University of Nijmegen, Exteroceptive and proprioceptive contributions to the prediction of other's actions

• It is argued that the primary function of the brain is too minimize prediction errors about how the world will look like next. Other agents are affecting the world massively.
  In series of experiments, we investigated the contribution of exteroceptive and proprioceptive experiences on how well we can predict other's actions to shed some new light on the underlying brain circuits and early cognitive development of action prediction mechanisms.

25 April 2018, Dr Huw Williams, University of Exeter, The – usually – hidden brain injury: a target for violence prevention?

• Neurodisabilities (NDs) have been known to be present in people in custody. The links between NDs and crime are not well understood. Crime is, of course, multi-determined with a host of risk factors.
  However, we have identified how Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) is a key factor in violent crime. It is linked to earlier, more violent and persistent, offending. Importantly, it can be managed. More than half of people in prisons have had a brain injury. Many with significant injury (2 in 10). Brain Injury leads people to being impulsive, poor at problem-solving, and with poor social communication skills – with increased chances of mental health and drug misuse.
  TBI is a key factor in the development of "Personality" factors linked to offending - particularly from childhood and young adulthood. We have shown that TBI in young people in custody (average age 16) is linked to suicidality.
  Various bodies in UK (YJB & MoJ, NICE, Justice Committees of Scottish and London Parliaments), New Zealand (Youth Justice), France (Ministry of Health) and USA (Juvenile systems New York) have implemented new initiatives to take account of TBI. To improve rehabilitation of offenders, and reduce crime in society.
  Initiatives include: screening for TBI; TBI Link-workers in prisons and enhanced formulation for vulnerable young people (YJB Wales). By addressing TBI and NDs it is likely that interventions may be improved."

• In England there are now over 1.25 million pupils aged 5–16 recorded as having English as an Additional Language (EAL), representing over 1-in-6 (18%) of all pupils.
  Drawing on a major report he produced for the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF), Steve will present an analysis of the England National Pupil Database (NPD) and summarise issues regarding trends, demographics and educational achievement of these young people at age 5, 7, 11 and 16.
  Both cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses will be presented, controlling for a range of confounding variables. Broadly speaking pupils with EAL start school with lower achievement than their mono-lingual English speaking peers, but there is no maths gap at age 11 and a negligible gap in overall achievement at age 16.
  The presentation will tease out the particular groups and combinations of factors associated with the risk of low educational achievement and consider implications for schools, Local Authorities and national Government, including how they collect and use a wide range of data to identify, fund and address educational needs.

• Two studies investigated aspects of children's reasoning about economic inequality. In the first study, children completed a Brief Implicit Association Task (BIAT) about social class.
  Child (aged 7, 9, and 11 years) were also read six vignettes in which an adult protagonist determined outcomes for children from either a lower- or an upper-class background.
  Although nine - and 11-year-old children demonstrated implicit bias, seven-year-old children did not. It was not until nine years of age, however, children were able to incorporate information about the likelihood of discrimination into account when deciding whether a class-related behaviour was unfair.
  In the second study, Participants (8, 11, 14, and 20 years) were asked to judge and reason about the acceptability of social exclusion from novel groups by children and head teachers and were assigned to one of three conditions, in which novel groups varied based on unequal economic status, location, or no reason.
  When judging a head teacher as a perpetrator, eight-year-olds assigned to the unequal economic status condition rated exclusion as worse than those assigned to the other conditions.
  In contrast, 14-year-olds assigned to the unequal economic condition rated exclusion as more acceptable than those assigned to the other conditions. 11-, and 14-, and 20-year-olds used reasoning to suggest that they accepted exclusion based on economic inequality.
  The studies converge in suggesting that with age, people accept economic inequality and do not perceive it as unfair.

• Impactful, interdisciplinary collaboration – in which the sciences, arts, and humanities contribute and benefit equally – is difficult to achieve. In this talk, new media artist Diego Maranan discusses how theories and approaches from the cognitive sciences were brought to bear on a collaborative, interdisciplinary, arts-based research in wearable technology, which in turn led to novel findings and new research directions in the cognitive and social sciences, as well as potential commercial applications.
  Drawing from somaesthetic philosophy, somatic practices, and technology design, Diego's research culminated in Haplós – a novel, wearable, programmable, remotely controlled technology using vibrating motors that can increase body awareness.
  In collaboration with members of the Cravings Lab at the University of Plymouth, Haplós was also used in a controlled experiment to investigate how vibrotactile stimuli could influence food cravings.
  Haplós was also used in RE/ME, a collaborative project exploring how to manipulate the perception of one's body size and shape, and which was recently awarded a grant to enable further development at a technology incubator in the Silicon Valley.
  Other potential applications of Haplós and tentative recommendations for how to successfully drive art-science collaborations will be discussed.

28 February 2018, Dr Andrew Logan, Bradford University, Identifying Impairments of Face Perception with a Novel Clinical Test

• Faces are amongst the most complex stimuli that the visual system processes. To quantify face discrimination sensitivity, we use synthetic faces which combine simplicity with sufficient realism to permit individual identification.
  We have developed a new clinical test of face perception which is fast (three to four minutes), repeatable (test-re-test r2=0.795) and can capture normal variability. The Caledonian face test uses an adaptive procedure to measure face discrimination thresholds; the minimum difference required between individual identities for reliable discrimination.
  A case report of a patient with suspected developmental prosopagnosia indicated that the test is highly sensitive to impairments of face perception (Z-score of -7; c.f. Z-score of -2 for existing face tests).
  An investigation of the effect of healthy ageing on face discrimination ability revealed that sensitivity to full faces continuously declined by approximately 13% per decade, after 50 years of age.
  While older adults performed poorer in every aspect of face perception, there was no effect of age for shape discrimination in an otherwise identical test protocol. This suggests that face discrimination may be particularly vulnerable to the effects of healthy ageing. Current work aims to quantify the effect of age-related macular degeneration (AMD) – a leading cause of visual impairment in the UK on face discrimination ability.
  On average, AMD reduces sensitivity to full faces by a factor of approximately 1.75X. Our data suggest that AMD does not impair discrimination of all face features equally, but disproportionately reduces sensitivity to those which facilitate aspects of non-verbal communication (e.g. facial expressions).

• Addictive drugs such as cocaine, heroin, or alcohol are often thought to be the same in their ability to produce ‘pleasure’ by activating the ‘reward’ circuitry of the brain.
  In this lecture, I will show that different classes of drugs produce unique neurobiological effects and distinctive internal states, which in turn are exquisitely sensitive to the environment surrounding drug use.

• The brain searches the environment for salient stimuli. We argue that this process is, at least in part, subliminal, with stimuli that are salient breaking into awareness.
  We investigate this breakthrough process with Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP), in which stimuli are presented rapidly (perhaps 12 per second) at the same spatial location.
  The Fringe-P3 method combines RSVP with EEG to provide a concealed knowledge test, which we have demonstrated has high sensitivity and specificity. Importantly, we have also shown that the Fringe-P3 method is resistant to the standard counter-measures that have confounded other deception detectors.
  This is due to the rapid mode of presentation, which renders participants unable to identify the control/irrelevant stimulus. Taking inspiration from these counter-measures experiments, we have further shown that in RSVP, the evidence does not accumulate across repetitions of a stimulus, unless it breaks through into awareness.
  This provides supporting evidence for a prediction of the Simultaneous Type/Serial Token model that the representation of episodic information is a conscious process.

• Human and non-human animals can use information provided by the geometry of the environment to navigate towards hidden goals. Despite a relative paucity of evidence, environmental geometry has been suggested to constitute a key component of global, allocentric representations of space – The cognitive map (e.g. Gallistel, 1990). Other research, however, has emphasised the role of more local, and egocentric, representations of environmental geometry for navigation (e.g. Pearce, 2009).
  In this lecture, I will present evidence for the use of both of these frames of representation during spatial navigation in virtual environments in human participants. In particular, we examined whether navigation based on these two representational frames is susceptible to interference from other spatial information (e.g. landmarks).
  Our results indicate that both cognitive maps and more local, egocentric, representations of space are susceptible to interference effects such as overshadowing, blocking or the ID-ED effect.

3 May 2017, Henry Otgaar, Maastricht University, Remembering and believing in the legal context

• Memory plays a vital role in the courtroom. In the majority of criminal trials, forensic technical evidence such as DNA-samples is lacking. Legal professionals such as judges have to base their decisions then on eyewitness testimonies and statements provided by suspects.
  Since such statements contain recollections of eyewitnesses or suspects, it is of the utmost relevance that memory experts can help legal professionals in educating them about the role of memory in court. Legal cases and experimental studies have shown that people can falsely remember entire traumatic episodes such as sexual abuse which has led to wrongful convictions.
  In this talk, I will present the latest work on the role of memory in court. I will do this by presenting new work from my lab and will clarify this work with legal cases in which I was involved as an expert witness.
  Also, I will make the suggestion that in many cases, people do not remember but merely believe that an event occurred and that such beliefs are likely to play a more important part in court than memory.

26 April 2017, Chris Harris, University of Plymouth, Decisions, decisions, decisions

29 March 2017, Phil McAleer, University of Glasgow, First impressions of speaker personality from voices

• Previous work from our group showed that the key personality traits listeners establish upon hearing novel voices can be reduced to a two-dimensional space aligned to ratings of Trustworthiness and Dominance.
  The 'Social Voice Space' shows remarkable consistency to the main personality traits found in other domains, including face perception, and is proposed to drive our decisions of whether to enact approach or avoidance behaviour.
  In this talk, I will provide a brief summation of the 'Social Voice Space' before presenting results from ongoing work that looks to establish the stability of such personality judgements across changing listener and speaker scenarios. I will conclude by outlining work exploring a proposed positivity bias in older listeners towards younger voices.

22 March 2017, Claire Braboszcz, University of Plymouth, Neuroscience of mental imagery

15 March 2017, Lisa Leaver, Exeter University, Cognition in grey squirrels: what we know and why it matters

1 March 2017, Paul Artes, University of Plymouth, Super-Vision – designing new vision tests with hyperacuity stimuli: rewards and challenges.

• Hyperacuities are a class of visual tasks with exquisitely low thresholds, with performance approximately ten times better than suggested by the spacing of retinal receptors.
  For example, human observers can detect misalignment between two lines (Vernier acuity), or distortions of a circular object (radial deformation acuity), of the order of a few seconds of arc.
  This seminar will illuminate some new clinical applications of hyperacuity stimuli for vision measurements in clinical practice, and discuss what innovations will be needed to translate cutting-edge visual psychophysics into practical clinical tools.

22 February 2017, Daryl O'Connor, University of Leeds, Karoshi: Effects of Stress on Health and Wellbeing

• This talk will argue that stress may indirectly contribute to health risk and reduced longevity to the extent that it produces deleterious changes in diet and/or helps maintain maladaptive health behaviours (e.g. smoking, alcohol consumption) as well as directly by influencing biological processes across the life span (e.g. blood pressure, hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis functioning).
  Studies investigating the relationship between chronic stress, perseverative cognition, the cortisol response and health outcomes will be presented.
  The second half of the talk will describe recent work investigating the role of HPA axis responses to stress in suicide attempters and ideators. The importance of studying the effects of stress across the life course and developing stress management interventions will also be highlighted.

8 February 2017, Debbie Mills, Bangor University, Interactions between language experience, emotion, and executive function: ERP studies of bilingual adults

1 February 2017, Sylvia Pan, Goldsmiths, University of London, What is Virtual Reality and How Does it Work for Social Psychologists?

25 January 2017, Andy Wills, University of Plymouth, Progress in modelling through distributed collaboration: Concepts, tools, and examples

• Formal modelling in psychology is failing to live up to its potential due to a lack of effective collaboration. As a first step towards solving this problem, the Catlearn Research Group have produced a set of freely-available tools for distributed collaboration.
  In this talk, I'll describe those tools and the conceptual framework behind them. I'll also provide concrete examples of how these tools can be used. The approach I propose enhances, rather than supplants, more traditional forms of publication.\
  All the resources for this project are freely available from the catlearn website.

18 January 2017, Lorraine Whitmarsh, Cardiff University, Behaviour change or lifestyle change? Evidence and prospects for behavioural 'spillover'

• There is increasing acknowledgment that profound changes to individual behaviour are required in order to tackle climate change, and yet policies to achieve these changes have so far met with limited success.
  Most people are willing to make only very small changes to their lifestyle – so new ways of encouraging green behaviour which can match the scale of the climate change challenge are needed.
  The UK government and several psychologists have suggested behavioural 'spillover' might be a way to achieve this. Spillover is the notion that taking up one green behaviour (e.g. recycling) can lead on to other green behaviours (e.g. taking your own bags shopping). Ultimately, this might hold the key to moving beyond piecemeal behaviour change to achieving more ambitious, holistic lifestyle change.
  This seminar will present initial work to explore when spillover does, does not, and could, occur using: UK correlational data, a field experiment of the Welsh carrier bag change, and lab experiments to induce behavioural spillover. Planned work to explore spillover across diverse cultures will also be outlined.

26 October 2016, Bob French, University of Borgouyne

• Games involving cognitive skills of any kind have at least one thing in common: an adult can without the slightest effort beat a five-year-old child at them. With one exception: Concentration. The game works like this
  A deck of cards consisting of pairs of various images, for example, pairs of images of various Pokemon characters: two Pikachu cards, two Charizard cards, two Gyarados cards, etc., is randomly dealt out, face down, on the table
  Each of the two players takes turns turning over two cards. If they match, they keep that pair of cards and play again. If the two cards turned over do not match, they are turned face down again in their original locations and the other player plays
  The game continues until there are no more cards on the table. The winner is the person with the most cards. Clearly this game requires two different memory skills: image-recollection and location-recollection
  Along with other researchers, we have shown that adults are very significantly better at both of these memory skills than young children
  And yet, children perform as well, and often better, than adults at this game, one that requires both image – and location – recognition! How on earth is this possible? I present a simple connectionist model that provides insight for a possible solution to this paradox
  The model suggests that no separate mechanisms are required for children to achieve their astonishingly good performance on this task. It also suggests a way for you to not be humiliated by being thrashed by your five-year-old child at this game.

19 October 2016, William Simpson, University of Plymouth, What causes the other-race effect? Evidence from classification images

2 October 2016, Graham Turpin, University of Sheffield, Books on prescription, self-help and trauma: a cautionary tale

• Bibliotherapy and self-help are recognized features of many UK mental health services. Since the pioneering work of Neil Frude, Books on Prescription (BOP) Schemes have arisen in many NHS services through partnerships with public libraries.
  At the same time, the importance of 'Stepped Care Models' of service delivery has been stressed, whereby Psychological Wellbeing Practitioners offer low intensity psychological interventions such as bibliotherapy and self-help.
  A recent national development by a leading charity involving public libraries, the Reading Agency, has drawn these two initiatives together.
  The progress made in rolling out nationally the Reading Well Books on Prescription scheme covering common mental health conditions, dementia, young people's mental health and long-term physical conditions will be briefly reviewed.
  It cannot be assumed, however, that every self-help intervention is effective in moderating symptoms and psychological problems. Research on providing self-help information to people who have recently attended hospital Accident and Emergency departments will be presented.
  Although attendees generally value being given relevant information, no evidence of the efficacy of information provision on moderating symptoms of PTSD was obtained in three independent RCTs. The implications of these studies for self-help provision are discussed.

5 October 2016, Bahar Koymen, Manchester University, Putting heads together: Children's reasoning with others

• Reasoning is classically viewed as an individual skill enabling a person to reach conclusions based on evidence. More recent accounts, however, have highlighted that reasoning – in the more restricted sense of explicating reasons for actions or conclusions – is a fundamentally social skill enabling two or more people to produce and evaluate one another's arguments in order to reach joint decisions (Mercier & Sperber, 2011; Tomasello, 2014).
  Therefore, in making joint decisions with a partner, children must evaluate the evidence behind their respective claims and so the rationality of their respective proposals. In this talk I will present series of studies in which three-, five-, and seven-year-old children produced and evaluated reasons with their peer partners to reach joint decisions.
  The findings overall suggest that children as young as three-year-olds are able to reason with others. Children get better at reasoning in late preschool ages and eventually become very 'strategic' reasoners at school ages.
  Overall, these results support the view of children's joint reasoning as a fundamentally cooperative enterprise aimed at making jointly rational decisions.

4 May 2016, Nicola Byrom, Oxford University, Attending to the bigger picture; attentional breadth may be influencing how we construct models of life experience

23 March 2016, Ian Apperly, University of Birmingham, How do we take other people's perspectives, and who cares?

• A growing literature on perspective-taking paints a complex picture. Perspective-taking may be spatial or social; automatic or controlled; and clearly depends on multiple cognitive mechanisms.
  I will describe some recent results from adults and children that suggest there is order in this chaos. One reason why we should care about this because it provides a powerful framework for investigating individual differences in healthy and pathological perspective-taking.

16 March 2016, Jelena Havelka, University of Leeds, Visuospatial bootstrapping effects in working memory

• It has recently been demonstrated that immediate memory for digits is superior when items are presented in a meaningful 'keypad' spatial configuration.
  This phenomenon, termed 'visuospatial bootstrapping', involves the integration of verbal and spatial information in working memory via stored knowledge in long-term memory. We have recently explored the basis of this effect experimentally using dual-task manipulations, with outcomes indicating contributions to verbal-spatial binding from spatial working memory and modality-general storage (possibly within the episodic buffer).
  We have also examined the extent to which the effect emerges in different population groups, including children of different ages, healthy older adults, and individuals with mild cognitive impairment.
  An overview of this recent work will be provided, along with a consideration of current and future directions.

9 March 2016, Reinout Wiers, University of Amsterdam, Assessing and Changing Implicit Cognition in Addiction

• Dual process models have described addiction as a combination of relatively strong bottom-up cue-related neurocognitive processes and relatively weak top-down cognitive control processes.
  In line with this perspective, we found across several studies a larger impact of memory associations and approach tendencies on behaviour in adolescents with relatively weak cognitive.
  Dual-process models have recently come under fire, but we think they can still be useful at a descriptive psychological level, while more work should be done to illuminate the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms. Moreover, dual process models inspired new interventions aimed at changing relatively automatic processes in addiction, varieties of Cognitive Bias Modification (CBM) paradigms.
  I will present work on attentional re-training in alcoholism and on approach-bias re-training which have yielded clinically relevant results. I will also present some recent studies concerning online applications of CBM and on the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms in these training studies.

2 March 2016, Neil Ferguson, Liverpool Hope University, Leaving violence behind: Disengaging from terrorism in Northern Ireland

• This presentation explores the processes involved in leaving social movements or disengaging from terrorist activities by providing an analysis of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and Red Hand Commando (RHC) transformation away from politically motivated violence towards a civilian non-military role.
  Interpretative phenomenological analysis was employed to gain an understanding of participant accounts of leaving violence behind and disengaging from terrorism. Analysis of the interview transcripts revealed the interplay of individual, organisation and societal level processes in incentivising and obstructing disengagement from politically motivated violence.
  The findings resonate with other case studies exploring the processes involved in disengagement from political violence among other terror groupings across the globe.
  The results are discussed in relation to a number of topics, including the implementation DDR in post-conflict societies, the dynamic role of collective identity in the engagement in and disengagement from politically motivated violence and the role of prison in shaping disengagement from politically motivated violence.

24 February 2016, Caroline Rowland, University of Liverpool, How do children learn grammar? Evidence from production, comprehension and explanatory models

• Research on language development, particularly the development of grammar, has traditionally focused on debating the extent to which language learning depends on innate knowledge or environmental support.
  On the one hand, many studies, mainly on speech production (e.g. Pine et al., 1998), have suggested that children start out with pockets of knowledge-based round an inventory of item-based frames.
  This evidence supports an approach that sees grammar development as a gradual process of abstraction across specific instances in the child's input. On the other hand, a different body of work, mainly on language comprehension, suggests that children use abstract grammatical categories from the earliest age tested (e.g. Gertner et al., 2006).
  This evidence supports an approach that proposes innate syntactic, semantic or conceptual knowledge at the core of grammar acquisition, and which predicts more rapid learning. However, recent work suggests that this is a false dichotomy; children and adults have both abstract knowledge and knowledge centred around lexical items at all stages of development.
  Thus, the traditional approaches are breaking down. What is replacing them is a focus on explanatory models designed to answer a different question: 'How do the child's learning mechanisms exploit information in the environment to build mature linguistic knowledge?'
  In this talk I use recent work from our lab to demonstrate what this approach has taught us so far about grammar acquisition, focussing on work that demonstrates what kind of learning mechanism best explains developmental differences in structural priming.
  I show how this new approach requires that we factor into our models the mechanisms underlying language processing, since the results of all studies on children's language development reflect not only children's knowledge of their language, but also the processing constraints that operate when we produce or comprehend language.

17 February 2016, Sylvia Terbeck, University of Plymouth, Recent development of two topics: Music and intergroup relations and Immersive Virtual Reality and intergroup relations

• Social psychology might benefit from a multimodal approach including insides from music psychology as well as computer science. We recently found that music and synchronised activity might enhance empathy and reduce prejudice.
  Furthermore, besides using traditional questionnaire-based methods we developed a 3D immersive Virtual Reality (IVR) paradigm to study moral and social decisions.
  We found the IVR paradigm to be superior to previous methods as "dark tirade" personality variables could predict the more realistic IVR actions but not the theoretical decisions. Using IVR might thus have great benefit to the study of psychology, and I will show you how simple *programming* could be.

10 February 2016, Kristina Suchotzki, Wurzburg University, Germany, Lie to Me – An experimental investigation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying deception

20 January 2016, Allegra Cattani, University of Plymouth, Children's first words and gestures: A cross-linguistic study

• Word and gesture learning emerge naturally in child development. Infants learn to speak and to gesture following the same developmental milestones.
  First, a new picture naming task, with standardisation norms of over 370 English-speaking British children, assessing the lexical subcomponents of comprehension and production in toddlers between 19 and 36 months, is presented.
  This structured task is then used to examine the lexical ability and the gesture production on a sample of British, Australian, and English toddlers. The effects of cultural and linguistic differences are explained.

13 January 2016, Markus Binderman, University of Kent, Resource limits as the cause of errors in face matching

• In face matching, observers have to decide whether two photographs of unfamiliar faces depict the same person or different people. This task is of great applied importance for person identification at airports and national borders, but it is also prone to error. In this talk, I will look at a key cause of these errors.

2 December 2015, Christian Fullgrabe, MRC Institute of Hearing Research, Nottingham, Beyond audibility – Age-related changes in speech perception despite clinically normal hearing

• Anecdotal evidence and experimental investigations indicate that older people experience increased speech-perception difficulties, especially in noisy environments.
  Since peripheral hearing sensitivity declines with age, lower speech intelligibility can often be explained by a reduction in audibility.
  However, aided speech-perception in hearing-impaired listeners frequently falls short of the performance level that would be expected based on the audibility of the speech signal. Given that many of these listeners are older, poor performance may be caused by age-related changes in supra-threshold auditory and/or cognitive processes that are not captured by the standard clinical assessment – the audiogram.
  The presentation will discuss experimental evidence obtained from clinically normal-hearing adults showing that auditory temporal processing, cognition (e.g. processing speed, attention, memory), and speech-in-noise processing (from phoneme identification to paragraph comprehension) are indeed linked and, independently of hearing loss, decline across the adult lifespan.
  These findings highlight the need to take into account these audibility-unrelated factors in the prediction and rehabilitation of speech processing across adulthood.

25 November 2015, Jon May, University of Plymouth, 'I can resist anything except temptation': a cognitive-motivational intervention to support abstinence

• One of the biggest psychological barriers to quit attempts are cravings for the substance or activity from which people are trying to abstain. Elaborated Intrusion theory (Kavanagh, Andrade & May, 2005) explains cravings as cognitive-emotional states in which external or internal cues trigger intrusive thoughts (I need a drink) that are then elaborated, generating embodied images of the desired substance.
  These images are rich in sensory detail (the appearance, smell and taste of a drink), simulating the desired experience and conveying the pleasure or relief of the real thing. Being proximal and concrete, these highly vivid images dominate experience and drive out the intention to abstain.
  I shall review evidence from laboratory and field studies testing EI theory, and present some preliminary data on a novel motivational intervention called Functional Imagery Training, or FIT.
  The focus of FIT is on making the imagery associated with succeeding in a quit attempt richer and more concrete so that it can compete with the shorter term temptations, and help people to withstand them.

18 November 2015, Stephanie Dornschneider, Buckingham University, Whether to Protest: Evidence from the Arab Spring.

• During mass uprisings, why do certain people join the protests against their governments, while others stay at home?
  Focusing on structural or organizational factors that contribute to political mobilization, much of the existing literature fails to address this difference in behavior. In response, this presentation draws on the literature on beliefs and belief systems to explore the reasoning processes by which individuals (fail to) decide to join political protests.
  Focusing on the Arab Spring as a particular case, it examines 121 protestors and non-protestors from Egypt – a country where the Arab Spring protests led to the fall of the president – and Morocco – a country where the head of state did not resign as a result of the uprisings. Information about the reasoning processes of these individuals was gathered through field research (ethnographic interviews) and Facebook groups.
  To construct reasoning processes from these sources, the analysis applied qualitative methods developed by Strauss and Corbin, coding the people's direct speech into beliefs, belief connections (inferences), and decisions for actions.
  To analyze these data, which consist of trillions of combinations of beliefs and inferences, the analysis developed a computational model (in Python). The model systematically evaluates the protestors' and non-protestors' reasoning processes, contributing new insight into the sources of political protest.

11 November 2015, Clare Press, Birkbeck, University of London, Mapping between action and action perception: Domain-specificity and implications for autism

• Mechanisms which map between the visual appearance of an action and the motor codes required to perform it are crucial for a range of functions, including imitation and action control, and possibly also play a role in action perception and understanding.
  The first part of my talk will present some studies addressing the domain-specificity of underlying mechanisms. It will examine whether the mechanisms mapping motor codes to observed actions are separable from those mapping motor codes to associated inanimate events, as required for stamping on the brake pedal when we see a red light.
  It will also investigate whether action influences perception of predicted sensory consequences in a different manner from inanimate predictive events.
  The second part of my talk will present work addressing differences in action production and perception in autism, and asking which mechanisms may be functioning atypically.

4 November 2015, Fred Cummins, University College Dublin, Prayer, Protest and Football: the Puzzles of Joint Speech

• Joint speech is an umbrella term covering choral speech, synchronous speech, chant, and all forms of speech where many people say the same thing at the same.
  Under an orthodox linguistic analysis, there is nothing here to study, as the formal symbolic structures of joint speech do not appear to differ from those of language arising in other forms of practice.
  As a result, there is essentially no body of scientific inquiry into practices of joint speaking. Yet joint speaking practices are ubiquitous, ancient, and deeply integrated into rituals and domains to which we accord the highest significance.
  I will discuss Joint Speech, as found in prayer, protest, classrooms, and sports stadia around the world. If we merely take the time to look there is much to be found in joint speech that is crying out for elaboration and investigation.
  I will attempt to sketch the terra incognita that opens up and present a few initial findings (phonetic, anthropological, neuroscientific) that suggest that Joint Speech is far from being a peripheral and exotic special case. It is, rather, a central example of language use that must inform our theories of what language and languaging are.

21 October 2015, Stephen Hall, University of Plymouth, Brain rhythms: where do they come from and what do they mean?

• Brain rhythms or ‘Oscillations’ are neuronal network phenomena, first recorded almost a century ago. In the time since these first recordings, brain rhythms have been studied across a wide range of species, under many different experimental conditions.
  Here, I will introduce the topic of brain rhythms, through a discussion of the various cognitive and behavioural functions in which they have been implicated. I will describe some of the basic physiological principles of oscillations and how this relates to our ability to measure them. I will discuss some of the differences between evoked and induced oscillations. Finally, I will explore some of the theories surrounding the potential significance and importance of these phenomena (or epiphenomena?).

25 March 2015, Douglas Martin, University of Aberdeen, How do cultural stereotypes form?

• We all share knowledge of the cultural stereotypes associated with social groups (e.g., Scottish people are miserly, scientists are geeky, men like the colour blue) – but what are the origins of these stereotypes?
  We have examined the possibility that stereotypes form spontaneously as information is repeatedly passed from person to person. As information about novel social targets is passed down a chain of individuals, what initially begins as a set of random associations evolves into a system that is simplified and categorically structured.
  Following repeated social transmission, novel stereotypes emerge that are not only increasingly learnable but that also allow generalizations to be made about previously unseen social targets.
  By understanding how cognitive and social factors influence the cumulative cultural evolution of stereotypes in the lab, it might be possible to gain insight into how stereotypes might naturally evolve or be manipulated.