Department of Psychology

March 2, 2023

12:20-1:30 pm, Rappaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

Joel Christensen, PhD Brandeis University

This talk will survey 20th century psychological approaches to ancient Epic in order to frame the place of my recent book, The Many Minded Man, in classical scholarship. I will provide a summary of how I have used principles and insights from modern clinical and cognitive psychology to help us understand challenging structural and interpretive features of the Odyssey, focusing in particular on the Homeric depiction of Telemachus and the end of the Poem. I will close by talking about how some of these approaches apply to the Iliad and why reframing Greek epic as therapeutic rather than literary is important.

February 9, 2023

12:20-1:30 pm, Rappaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

Margaret Sheridan, PhD University of North Carolina

Dr. Sheridan will present her work investigating if and how early adversity impacts brain and behavioral development. In particular, she investigates the way in which experiences in early childhood shape risk for psychopathology across the lifespan. Dr. Sheridan's work includes some of the only causal longitudinal evidence in humans documenting the impact of adversity on brain and behavioral development long-term. In addition, Dr. Sheridan focuses on how early experiences shape brain development delineating associations between dimensions of experience, measurable across a variety of exposures, and cognitive and neural processes in early childhood and adolescence.

October 20, 2022

12:20-1:30 pm, Rappaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

Matt Nassar, PhD Brown University

People flexibly adjust their use of information according to context. The same piece of information, for example the unexpected outcome of an action, might be highly influential on future behavior in one situation -- but utterly ignored in another one. Bayesian models have provided insight into why people display this sort of behavior, and even identified potential neural mechanisms that link to behavior in specific tasks and environments, but to date have fallen short of providing broader mechanistic insights that generalize across tasks or statistical environments. Here I'll examine the possibility that such broader insights might be gained through careful consideration of task structure. I'll show that we can think about a large number of sequential tasks as requiring the same inference problem -- that is to infer the latent states of the world and the parameters of those latent states -- with the primary distinctions within the class defined by transition structure. Then I'll talk about how a neural network that updates latent states according to a known transition structure and learns "parameters" of the world for each latent state can explain adaptive learning behavior across environments and provide the first insights into neural correlates of adaptive learning across environments. This model generates internal signals that identify the need for latent state updating, which maps onto previous observations made in pupil dilations and P300 responses across different task environments. I will also discuss an experiment that we are currently setting up to test the idea that these signals might reflect a latent state update signal, with a focus on relationships to learning and perception. Finally, I discuss how deviations from normative structure learning might give rise to aberrant belief updating in mental illness.

September 15, 2022

12:20 to 1:30 pm, Rappaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

Marc Howard, PhD Boston University

Time is central to our experience.   As events unfold we remember the past and anticipate the future. Recent years have seen progress in our understanding of how the brain represents the time of past events.  After a stimulus is experienced, so-called "time cells" activate in a reliable sequence.  Because the sequence is reliable, at any moment we can decode how far in the past the stimulus was presented.  Because different stimuli trigger different sequences we can use the activity of time cells in the present to decode what happened when in the past.   These findings from neuroscience have been paralleled, and in many cases anticipated, by empirical results and computational models from cognitive psychology.   Findings using response times from short-term memory experiments suggest that people can "scan" a timeline of the recent past to find a target in much the same way that they can scan a visual display.  We review recent evidence (Tiganj, Singh, et al., 2022; JEP:G) showing that people can also scan a timeline of the proximate future.  This suggests that the brain manages somehow to construct an ordered timeline of the future that mirrors the representation of the time of past events.

December 5, 2019

Dr. Anne Krendl, Indiana University

Healthy aging has been widely shown to have deleterious impacts on older adults’ (individuals over the age of 60) cognitive function, including their memory, executive function, and social cognition. Although the mechanisms associated with these declines have been widely studied, numerous questions remain. We thus used a network neuroscience approach to provide new insights into the effects of aging on the structure and function of brain networks. We focus specifically on the networks that support theory of mind (inferring others’ mental states), a core social cognitive function. There are two goals of this work: 1) to characterize how older adults’ brain networks differ from young adults’ (individuals between the ages of 18-30) at rest and during task; and 2) to characterize how these differences might affect older adults’ theory of mind. Together, these data will reveal more specific mechanisms of how aging impacts social cognitive function.

November 21, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., Lurias, Hassenfeld

Dr. Alison Adcock, Duke University

Motivation guides and animates behavior based on predictions from memory representations. The role of motivation in reinforcement learning has long been studied in animal paradigms that require extrinsic incentives. Ironically, however, neuroscience is only recently coming to study how motivation guides memory to assemble complex models of the world and the pursuit of knowledge – motives that guide science itself. Now, a fortuitous explosion of tools for understanding the biology of human cognition allows linking such questions to the long and rich experimental traditions in animals. Specifically, the ability to characterize brain configurations associated with distinct motivational states offers exciting new insights into neuromodulatory systems associated with motivation and the neural foundations of adaptive memory formation. These biological findings, in turn, point to new behavioral predictions and questions about learning and memory. The work of the Adcock laboratory is to understand how motivation shapes memory formation and to help leverage that understanding to improve education, learning-based therapies, and biological targets for well-being. In this talk, I review our work to selectively use behavior to change the brain and to understand how motivational regulation may support specialized memories for successful human adaptation.

October 10, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Angela Gutchess, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University

In my talk, I will discuss research my lab has conducted investigating the influences of aging and culture on memory. Although many losses and changes occur in traditional memory systems with age, declines may be more pronounced in some domains than others, some strategies may help to mitigate changes in memory, and the effectiveness of strategies could vary across individuals. I will discuss two lines of work, the first examining how self-referencing, relating information to the self, impacts memory and neural engagement. The second will focus on cross-cultural differences in memory, exploring how culture can act as a lens to shape information processing in terms of memory for specific visual details, the ways in which cultures differ in the engagement of underlying neural regions, and how these cultural differences could be impacted by aging.

September 25, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

 Dr. Kathrin Ohla, Cognitive Neuroscience, Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany

 The taste system provides important information about the edibility and makro-nutrient content of a food via differentiation between taste qualities. Specific receptors on the tongue are activated by chemicals signifying a taste quality before the signal is conveyed to the brain. How this peripheral signal is used by the central nervous system to encode taste quality is largely unknown. Cortical activation patterns change rapidly, within milliseconds, rendering temporal information a candidate variable for taste quality coding. Using non-invasive electrophysiological recordings, which provide a window into taste-neuronal processing with millisecond resolution, I will illustrate that large-scale neuronal response patterns carry information about taste quality and bear significance to taste-related behavior. I will demonstrate that these neuronal response patterns carry information about which taste participants tasted and that their onset predicts the timing of perceptual decisions. Furthermore, I will present novel data that suggest that taste perception and neuronal responses are susceptible to information. Together, I aim to show that the information encoded in taste-related neural response patterns is also the foundation for gustatory decision-making and that the timing aligns with task-specific goals.

September 12, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Jennifer Gutsell, Department of Psychology, Brandeis University

With increasing diversity in society and organizations, intergroup interactions will become a much more integral part of every American's day to day experience, requiring empathy, perspective-taking, and cooperation that can transcend across group boundaries. My and others' work shows that neural resonance, a basic neural process involved in these critical social functions, might be reduced or even absent during intergroup interactions. Usually, people show similar neural activation during experience and observation of similar experiences in others, and such neural resonance is thought to provide a basic, embodied understanding of the other's state potentially contributing to empathy. Often neural resonance has been thought of as a bottom-up process, but we now understand that it is affected by top-down cognitive and motivational factors including those based on social perception, biases, and the broader interaction context. In this talk, I will first review studies that suggest an ingroup bias in neural resonance: People show neural resonance in response to the actions and emotions of ingroup members, but not in response to the actions and emotions of outgroup members. I will then highlight biased empathy as a potential consequence of neural resonance biases by looking at to what extent neural resonance is associated with the tendency to empathize and with how accurately people infer others affective states. Finally, I will present a series of studies that explore facilitating and hampering conditions for cross-group neural resonance. I will end with an outlook on the methodological challenges and potential solutions to study neural processing involved in cross-group empathy within naturalistic interaction settings that take place in a broader cultural context.

April 18, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Rosie Cowell, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Abstract:  Accounts of cognition often assume that the brain is organized along lines of cognitive process, for example, with recollection mediated by one neural substrate and familiarity by another. We argue that cognitive processes – introspectively-identifiable mental events like recollection – are inadequate labels for characterizing neural mechanisms, because they conflate lower-level components of the mechanisms we seek to identify. Recollection involves both a neurocomputational operation (pattern completion) and a neural representation (high-dimensional, associative content). To uncover memory's mechanisms, we must decompose cognitive processes into their operations and representations, asking how each separately, and their interaction, gives rise to neural and behavioral phenomena. I will present theoretical and empirical work ‒ including connectionist simulations and fMRI data ̶ that implies we can replace process-based accounts of memory with a representational account. In other words, rather than explaining what different brain regions do by appeal to cognitive processes (e.g., recollection happens in hippocampus and familiarity in neocortex), we should appeal to representational content (high-dimensional representations are supported by hippocampus and lower-dimensional representations by neocortex).

March 14, 2019

12–1:30 p.m. International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Jonathan Peelle, Washington University in St. Louis

Abstract: How does acoustic clarity affect the way our brains process speech, and how might this change with adult aging? I will review data from behavioral and brain imaging studies that speak to the added cognitive demands associated with acoustic challenge. Findings support a shared resource framework of speech comprehension in which domain-general cognitive processes are required for both auditory and linguistic processing. The specific patterns of neural activity depend on the difficulty of the speech being heard, as well as the hearing and cognitive ability of each individual listener. I will also talk about some preliminary work looking at how we might be able to help listeners compensate for cognitive challenges and improve their understanding of what they are hearing.

March 7, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Mike Kahana, UPenn

Abstract: Human memory function is highly variable, fluctuating between periods of high and low performance even within a given person. Neurosurgical patients with indwelling electrodes present a unique opportunity to study the neural correlates of this variability and to define both the features of neural activity at a given brain location and the functional connections between brain regions that predict variability in memory encoding and retrieval. Here, I will describe our recent efforts to characterize brain networks that support memory via correlative (passive neural recording) and causal (direct electrical stimulation) approaches. Throughout the brain, we find that low-frequency networks exhibit reduced local power but stronger functional connectivity during successful episodic encoding and retrieval. Furthermore, many canonical memory regions emerge as hubs of such low-frequency connections, including the lateral frontotemporal cortices, the parahippocampal gyrus – and within it – the entorhinal cortex. High-frequency bands (i.e. gamma, 30+ Hz) almost exclusively exhibit desynchronization during successful memory operations. We recently extended these correlative studies and used intracranial stimulation to ask whether functional connections imply causality. We confirmed that electrical stimulation evokes increases in theta power at remote regions, as predicted by the strength of low-frequency functional connections. This relation was strongest when stimulation occurred in or near white matter. These findings demonstrate the importance of low-frequency connectivity to episodic memory, integrating these findings over spatial scales and through causal and correlative approaches.

January 17, 2019

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Catherine Hartley, NYU

Abstract:  Computational reinforcement learning models provide a framework for understanding how individuals can evaluate which actions are beneficial and which are best avoided. To date, these models have primarily been leveraged to understand learning and decision-making in adults. In this talk, I will present studies characterizing developmental changes, from childhood to adulthood, in the cognitive representations and computations engaged to evaluate and select actions. I will discuss how these changes may optimize behavior for an individual’s developmental stage and unique life experiences.

November 29, 2018

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Nancy Kanwisher, McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT

November 1, 2018

12–1:30 p.m., Levine-Ross, Hassenfeld

Dr. Meghan Meyer, Dartmouth

September 27, 2018

12–1:30 p.m., International Lounge, Usdan

Dr. Donald Katz, Brandeis University

March 29, 2018

12–1:30 p.m.

• Dr. Joshua O. Goh, National Taiwan University

Location: Luria 1-3, Hassenfeld

March 22, 2018

12–1:30 p.m.

• Dr. Richard N. Aslin, Yale University
  

Location: Luria 1-3, Hassenfeld

February 8, 2018

12–1:30 p.m.

• Arthur F. Kramer, PhD, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Location: Alumni Lounge, Usdan

January 25, 2018

12–1:30 p.m.

Featuring talks by:

• Dr. Valerie Purdie Greenaway, Columbia University

• Dr. Jiyoung Park, University of Texas at Dallas

Location: Rapaporte Treasure Hall, Goldfarb Library

A special talk sponsored by the Chief Diversity Officer, Provost, and the Dean of Arts and Sciences, Heller, and IBS.

A Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Program