Talks take place on Thursdays at 5.15pm, in Room 313 at the UCL Psychology Department (26 Bedford Way, WC1H 0AP).
Below you can see a list of speakers we have coming up in our seminar series this term. Some speakers for this term will be joining us online. Please note that, unfortunately, we cannot accept an online audience.
Jump to: Previous Talks
Email valentina.vellani.19@ucl.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list for our seminar announcements
Winter Term 2020
| Date
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Speaker | Title | |
| Thursday 9th January |
Tobias Kalenscher*-University Düsseldorf | To give or not to take – framing effects boost generosity during social discounting |
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| Thursday 16th January |
Danielle Bassett*-University of Pennsylvania | The Curious Human | |
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| Thursday 23th January |
Phil Corlett* | ||
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| Thursday 30th January |
Eugene Caruso*-UCLA Anderson School of Management | When the Future Looms Larger Than the Past: Some Empirical Tests of the Bias Toward the Future | |
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| Thursday 6th February |
Kenji Kobayashi*-University of Pennsylvania | ||
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| Thursday 13th February |
Alan Sanfey*-Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour | ||
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| Thursday 20th February |
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| Thursday 27th February |
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| Thursday 5th March | Tamir Diana*-Princeton University | Making predictions in the social world | |
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| Thursday 12th March | Lucina Uddin*-University of Miami | Brain dynamics and flexible behaviors | |
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| Thursday 19th March |
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| Thursday 26th March | Ralph Hertwig*-Max-Planck Institute for Molecular Genetics | ||
| ddd |
*Speaker is joining us online
Below you can see a list of speakers we have had previously.
Previous Talks
Fall Term 2019
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 26th September |
Rafael Polania* (ETH Zurich) |
Efficient coding of subjective value |
| Wednesday 2nd October |
Roshan Cools* (Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour) |
Chemistry of the adaptive mind |
| Thursday 10th October |
Annika Boldt (UCL) |
Distinct and overlapping neural correlates of metacognitive knowledge and metacognitive control |
| Thursday 17th October | Arno Riedl* (Maastricht University) | Neighborhood Choice in Cooperation and Coordination Games |
| Thursday 24th October |
Tatiana Lau (Royal Holloway) | Social Structure Learning in Anterior Insula |
| Thursday 31st October |
Jennifer Lerner* (Harvard University, Kennedy School) | The Sadness Trap: How experiences of loss precipitate future financial loss |
| Thursday 7th November |
Michael Koenigs* (University Of Wisconsin–Madison) |
Neuroeconomics in the clinic and courtroom |
| Thursday 14th November |
Cameron Brick (University of Cambridge) | Presenting a list of free, large-scale psychological datasets: research and teaching opportunities and examples about pro-environmental behaviour |
| Thursday 21st November |
Valeria Gazzola* (Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam) | TBC |
| Thursday 28th November |
Rani Moran (UCL) | Model Based Retrospective Inference in Reinforcement Learning |
| Thursday 5th December |
Jessica McFadyen (UCL) | Rapid neural circuits for aversive sensory processing and decision-making |
| Thursday 12 December |
Mael Lebreton* (Université de Genève) | Contextual biases in confidence judgments |
Summer Term 2019
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 25th April |
Daniel Sznycer* (University of Montreal) |
Architectural invariances in shame and pride |
| Thursday 2nd May |
Steve Sloman* (Brown University) |
Collective Cognition: Collaboration, Outsourcing, and Emergent Knowledge |
| Thursday 9th May |
Stefano Palminteri* (École Normale Supérieure) |
Behavioural and neural characterization of optimistic reinforcement learning |
| Thursday 16th May | Matthew Apps (Oxford) |
How statistical information about costs and benefits are processed in the brain |
| Thursday 23rd May |
Niko Steinbeis (UCL) | Understanding the role of top-down behavioural control in the regulation of socio-affective processes, decision-making, and learning across child- and adolescent development |
| Thursday 30th May |
Anna van Duijvenvoorde (Leiden University)* | Adolescent’s learning in social contexts |
Spring Term 2019
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 17th January |
Jens Koed Madsen (Oxford) |
Implementing cognitive models in complex agent-based systems |
| Thursday 24th January |
Susan Fiske* (Princeton) |
Navigating the Social World: The Case for Universal Dimensions of Evaluation |
| Thursday 31st January |
Mina Cikara* (Harvard) |
Criminality racializes, achievement homogenizes: Narratives shape cognitive representations of immigrants and immigration policy preferences |
| Thursday 7th February | David Garcia* (Complexity Science Hub – Vienna) |
Collective Emotions and Social Resilience in the Digital Traces After a Terrorist Attack |
| Thursday 14th February |
Tobias Donner* (Hamburg) | Understanding Variability in Brain and Behavior |
| Thursday 21st February |
Amy Orben (Oxford) | 1 billion correlations: quantifying the link between social media use and adolescent wellbeing |
| Thursday 28th February |
Arno Reidl* (Maastricht University) |
Neighborhood Choice in Cooperation and Coordination Games |
| Thursday 7th March |
Ben Tappin (Royal Holloway / MIT) |
Social incentives in political belief formation |
| Thursday 14th March |
Uma Karmarkar (UC San Diego) |
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| Thursday 21st March |
Neil Garrett (Princeton/Oxford) | Keeping Track: How Humans Evaluate Their Environment |
| Thursday 28th March |
Sander van der Linden (Cambridge) | A psychological vaccine against misinformation |
Michaelmas Term 2018
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 27th September |
Jay Van Bavel* (New York University) |
The Partisan Brain: A value-based model of political belief |
| Thursday 4th October |
Sarah Garfinkel (Sussex University) |
Interoceptive mechanisms underlying emotion and self-integration |
| Thursday 11th October |
Filip Gęsiarz (UCL) |
To Work or not to Work? How Inequality Affects Motivation |
| Thursday 18th October | Yaacov Trope* (New York University) |
Expansive and Contractive Regulatory Scope |
| Thursday 25th October |
Valerie Reyna* (Cornell) | A Fuzzy Trace Theory of Risky Decision Making: Healthy, Unhealthy, and Downright Criminal |
| Thursday 1st November |
Kara Weisman* (Stanford) | Concepts of mental life: Continuity and variability across development and cultures |
| Thursday 8th November |
Jennifer Lerner* (Harvard Kennedy School) |
The Sadness Trap |
| Thursday 15th November |
Katherine Milkman* (Wharton School of Business) |
How can we use insights from economics and psychology to change behaviour for good? |
| Thursday 22nd November |
Bastien Blain (UCL) |
Focused cognitive fatigue and impulsivity: behavioural evidence, neural mechanisms and pathological insights |
| Thursday 29th November |
Joseph Dunsmoor* (University of Texas at Austin) |
How Pavlovian conditioning can shape episodic memory |
| Thursday 6th December |
Ming Hsu* (UC Berkeley) | Understanding human sociality: From brain to behavior to society |
| Thursday 13th December |
Jukka-Pekka Onnela*
(Harvard School of Public Health) |
Smartphone-based Digital Phenotyping |
Summer Term 2018
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 26th April |
Eva Hudlicka* (UMassAmherst) |
Computational models of emotion |
| Thursday 3rd May |
Stephen Fleming (UCL) |
Why people don’t change their minds: metacognitive failures and radical beliefs |
| Thursday 10th May |
Yuan Chang Leong* (Stanford) |
Motivated seeing |
| Thursday 17th May | Alexander Todorov* (Princeton) |
Face Value: The Irresistible Influence of First Impressions |
| Thursday 24th May |
Nichola Raihani (UCL) |
The effects of paranoia on social cognition and behaviour |
| Thursday 31st May |
Micah Allen (UCL) |
Gut Feelings? Visceral and Autonomic Influences on Metacognitive Decision-Making |
| Thursday 7th June |
Toby Pilditch (UCL) |
Zero-sum reasoning and Dependency Aversion: How simple structures can lead us astray |
Spring Term 2018
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 18th January |
Alison Gopnik* (UC Berkeley) |
Life History and Learning: Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit trade-offs |
| Thursday 1st February |
Todd Braver* (Washington University) |
Motivation and Cognitive Control |
| Thursday 8th February |
Rosalind Picard* (MIT) |
What can we learn about anxiety, stress, and brain activity from a wristband? |
| Thursday 15th February |
Rebecca Lawson (University of Cambridge) |
Modelling cortical gain in autism |
| Thursday 22nd February |
Tom Griffiths* (Princeton University) |
Linking heuristics and rationality through bounded optimality |
| Thursday 1st March |
Lasana Harris (UCL) |
Facial emotion expression categorization |
| Thursday 8th March |
Fiery Cushman* (Harvard University) |
How we know what not to think |
| Thursday 15th March |
Elinor Amit* (Brown University) |
The distinct roles of visual and verbal processing in social cognition |
Michaelmas Term 2017
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 5th October |
Irma Kurniawan (Brain & Spine Institute, Paris) |
Past actions shape our future preferences |
| Thursday 12th October |
Floris de Lange (Radboud University, Nijmegen) |
How is visual perception biased? |
| Thursday 19th October |
Bojana Kuzmanovic (Max Planck Institute, Cologne) |
Computational components and causal mechanisms of the optimism bias in belief updating |
| Thursday 26th October |
Rebeccah Slater (University of Oxford) |
Measuring and modulating infant pain in early human development |
| Thursday 2nd November |
Andrew Westbrook (Washington University, St. Louis) |
Dopamine and proximity effects in cognitive control |
| Thursday 9th November |
Oded Berger-Tal (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) |
Confronting novel environments: the trade-off between exploration and exploitation. |
| Thursday 16th November |
Keno Juechems (University of Oxford) |
How internal context shapes value representation in the human brain |
| Thursday 30th November |
Oliver Robinson (University College London) |
Modelling avoidance in mood and anxiety disorders using reinforcement-learning |
| Thursday 7th December |
Thomas Gilovich (Cornell University) |
Enemies of Gratitude |
| Thursday 14th December |
Florian Zimmermann (University of Zurich) |
Dynamics of motivated beliefs |
Spring Term 2017
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 12th January |
Jennifer Logg (UC Berkeley) |
Theory of Machine: When do people rely on algorithms? |
| Thursday 19th January | Michael Sanders (Behavioural InsightsTeam) |
Social contagion and social licensing in charitable giving and beyond |
| Thursday 26th January | Cleotilde Gonzalez (Carnegie Mellon University) |
Adaptation to Change |
| Thursday 2nd February | Erin Rich (UC Berkeley) |
Dynamic encoding of choice in the orbitofrontal cortex |
| Thursday 9th February | Emilio Ferrara (University of South Carolina) |
Human behavior in techno-social systems |
| Thursday 16th February | No Affective Brain Seminar | |
| Thursday 23rd February | Alex Peysakhovich (Facebook Artificial Intelligence) |
Fixing the Replication Crisis with Machine Learning |
| Thursday 2nd March |
Pablo Barberá (University of South California) |
How Social Media Reduces Mass Political Polarization |
| Thursday 9th March |
Alexandra Constantinescu (Oxford University) |
Organizing conceptual knowledge in humans with a grid-like code |
| Thursday 16th March | Kiyohito Iigaya (University College London) |
Favouring Savouring: How Prediction Error Boosts Appetitive Anticipation |
| Thursday 23rd March | Sonia Bishop (UC Berkeley) |
TBC |
| Thursday 27th April |
Hal Hershfield (University of California, Los Angeles) |
When does the present end and the future begin? |
| Thursday 4th May |
Jane Wang (Deep Mind) |
TBC |
| Thursday 11th May |
Kenway Louie (New York University) |
Reward statistics, adaptive value coding, and efficient choice behavior |
| Thursday 18th May |
TBC | TBC |
| Thursday 25th May |
Corey White (Syracuse University) |
TBC |
| Thursday 1st June |
Birte Forstmann (University of Amsterdam) |
TBC |
Michaelmas Term 2016
| Date | Speaker | Title |
| Thursday 6th October |
Louisa Egan (University of Portland) |
Moral Licensing Effects as Acquired Behavior |
| Thursday 13th October | Christian Ruff (University of Zurich) |
Social decision making: Distinct causal brain mechanisms |
| Thursday 20th October | Anna Schapiro (Harvard) |
Complementary learning systems within the hippocampus: A neural network modeling approach to reconciling episodic memory with statistical learning |
| Thursday 27th October | Amit Sharma (Microsoft Research) |
The limits of social influence in online social networks |
| Thursday 3rd November | Keith Chen (UCLA, Uber) |
Flexible Work: How Drivers Respond to Dynamic Pricing and Work Flexibility on the Uber Platform |
| Thursday 17th November | Justin Rao (Microsoft Research) |
Understanding Charitable Giving Choices |
| Thursday 24th November | No Seminar | |
| Thursday 1st December | Filippo Menczer (Indiana University) |
The Spread of Misinformation in Social Media |
| Thursday 8th December | Daniel Bennett (University of Melbourne) |
The intrinsic value of information in decision making |
| Thursday 15th December | Jessica Bodford (Facebook & Arizona State) |
Cyberpsychology: Human interaction in the digital age |
Spring Term 2016
Michaelmas Term 2015
Summer Term 2015
Spring Term 2015
Michaelmas Term 2014
Summer Term 2014
Spring Term 2014
Michaelmas Term 2013
Summer Term 2013
Spring Term 2013
Michaelmas Term 2012
Summer Term 2012
