ABL Seminar

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

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

*Speaker is joining us online

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Below you can see a list of speakers we have had previously.

Previous Talks

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