Theory of Computing and Artificial Intelligence (ToCAI) Seminar

*** Everyone welcome no need to book in advance***

Date: Friday 6th May
Time: 14:00-16:00
Room: Town Hall Committee Room 2

Dr. Ed Awh (University of Chicago)

"Rhythmic brain activity tracks the content and timing of online spatial representations"

Abstract:A substantial body of evidence suggests that neural activity in the alpha frequency band (8-12 Hz) covaries with the locus of covert spatial attention, such that attention to one visual field yields a sustained decline in alpha power at contralateral electrode sites. In our work, we have exploited this covariation by using an inverted encoding model to reconstruct spatial response profiles (termed channel tuning functions, or CTFs) based on the topography of alpha activity on the human scalp. Thus, in a task that required the storage of locations in working memory, we observed a graded profile of activity across spatial channels that peaked at the stored location during both the encoding and delay periods of the task. These spatial CTFs provide an opportunity to quantify the basic tuning properties of online spatial memories to examine how the precision of neural representations changes with manipulations of the probability of storage or the number of items stored. In addition, I'll show that the same method can be used to track the locus and timing of covert attention following the presentation of symbolic orienting cues and during active visual search. Moreover, we demonstrate that dynamic changes in the selectivity of spatial CTFs provide a sensitive measure of the latency of covert orienting during visual search. These findings demonstrate the integral role that alpha band activity plays in the online representation of space, and provide a powerful new approach for tracking these representations during online storage and covert orienting.

Biography: Ed Awh is a professor in the Department of Psychology, The Institute for Mind and Biology, and the Grossman Institute for Neuroscience, Quantitative Biology and Human Behavior. His laboratory focuses on behavioral and neural studies of memory and attention. Dr. Awh’s lab employs psychophysics, EEG, and functional MRI to learn about the neural mechanisms underlying these basic cognitive processes and the relationship between these processes and other cognitive functions. Recent work has focused on the use of neural decoding techniques to track the contents of online memories and the locus of covert attention.

SAT Cross-Disciplinary Research Seminar: Dr Eduardo Coutinho

*** Everyone Welcome! No need to book in advance***

Date: Wednesday 27th April
Time: 15:00-16:00
Room: HG09

Dr Eduardo Coutinho
Department of Music, University of Liverpoool
Department of Computing, Imperial College London

"Automatic recognition of emotion in music and speech: Predicting second-by-second subjective feelings of emotion from psychoacoustic features and physiological responses" 

Abstract After a century of manifold developments in psychological research on the emotional power of music, during the last decade, research on how music pieces are associated with the communication and induction of affective states (emotions and moods) has increasingly become a central topic in the Computer Sciences and Affective Computing. The computational analysis of music has allowed to develop models that estimate the emotional impact of music, not only with the goal of finding new ways for indexing and recommending music from personal or shared libraries, but also for understanding how music creates emotion, and especially the links between music structure and emotional responses. In this talk, I will present a series of empirical and computational studies and attempt to demonstrate that spatiotemporal dynamics in (psycho)acoustic features can be used to predict the variations in the emotions perceived in music, as well as patterns of activity in the peripheral nervous system (e.g., changes in heart rate, skin temperature, respiration). Furthermore, together with the theoretical basis that permits to establish such link, I will demonstrate the existence of shared acoustic codes that allow listeners to perceive emotional meaning in both music and speech prosody. Finally, I will discuss the potential of automatic emotion recognition in music for applications in Healthcare and other everyday life circumstances that may benefit from the emotional power of music as a mediator for achieving specific therapeutic and cognitive goals. This talk will cover topics from the Affective Sciences, Music Psychology, and Computer Sciences, and will be generally accessible to both students (at all levels) and faculty. 

Bio Dr Eduardo Coutinho received his diploma in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of Porto (Portugal, 2003), and his doctoral degree in Computer and Affective Sciences from the University of Plymouth (UK, 2008). He is currently a Lecturer in Music Psychology at the University of Liverpool, and Research Associate in Affective Computing at Imperial College London. Previously, he was a Research Fellow in Music Psychology at the University of Sheffield and the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, and a Research Associate in Affective Computing at the Technical University of Munich. Coutinho works in the interdisciplinary fields of Music Psychology and Affective Computing, where his expertise is in the study of emotional expression, perception and induction through music, and the automatic recognition of emotion in music and speech. He has contributed to a broader understanding of the emotional impact of music on listeners, namely on the link between music structure and emotion, the types of emotions induced by music, and individual and contextual factors that mediate the relationships between music and listeners. Coutinho pioneered research on the computational analysis of emotional dynamics in music, and made significant contributions to the field of music emotion recognition, setting the new standard approach for recognition of emotional dynamics in music. Currently his work focuses on the application of music in Healthcare. For more information about Eduardo Coutinho and his work, please visit: http://www.eadward.org. 

 

Research Seminars: Prof Andy Field (Sussex University) and Dr Chris Askew (Kingston University)

*** Everyone welcome! No need to book!*** 

Date: Thursday 21st April  
Time: 14:00-16:00 
Room: Committee Room 2 

Prof. Andy Field (Sussex University) 
"Why I don't believe anything in Psychology" 

Abstract: A century ago, unknown to humankind, the Daemons came to Earth and bestowed upon us the power to investigate ourselves. It was called NHST. 

They told us it stood for Null Hypothesis Significance Testing. Having given us this power, they have watched us use it to discover things about the human mind. Now they have returned to use this knowledge to destroy us. Our only hope is if I can convince them that all psychological knowledge to date is in fact likely to be wrong. This talk describes my attempt to do this by looking at flaws in NHST, gaps in researchers knowledge about NHST, the way that psychologists probably mis-apply statistical methods, how psychology research follows a pattern likely to make it untrue, and how the incentive structures in academia promote unhelpful attitudes to knowledge. I don’t plan to offer any solutions, just a litany of misery. We’ll need a stiff drink afterwards. 

Biography: Andy Field is Professor of Child Psychopathology at the University of Sussex, UK. He researches the emotional development in children and dabbles in statistics when the mood takes him. He has published 86 research papers, 29 book chapters and 17 books mostly on the development of fear and anxiety in children or statistics. He authored the bestselling textbook ‘Discovering Statistics using SPSS: and sex and drugs and rock n’ roll’, for which he won the British Psychological Society book award in 2007 and is now in its fourth edition and has been cited over 26,000 times in scientific papers. He has subsequently written versions of the book for SAS and R. His new book ‘Discovering Statistics: The Reality Enigma’ is due out in May 2016 and promises to be ‘different’. You can decide for yourself at the time whether that’s a good thing. His uncontrollable enthusiasm for teaching statistics to psychologists has led to teaching awards from the University of Sussex (2001 and 2015), the British Psychological Society (2006) and a prestigious National Teaching fellowship (2000). He is currently co-editor-in-chief for the Journal of Experimental Psychopathology and Psychopathology Review, serves on the editorial boards of Clinical Child and Family Psychology Review and Research Synthesis Methods. He’s done other academic things too but he finds it tedious trying to remember what they might have been. None of them really matter because in the unlikely event that you’ve ever heard of him it’ll be as the ‘Stats book guy’. In his spare time, he plays the drums very noisily in a heavy metal band, which he finds therapeutic. 

Dr. Chris Askew (Kingston University) 

"Learning fear from observing others" 

Abstract: Self-report studies and experiments with animals and adults suggest that fear of a stimulus can be learned vicariously by observing someone else with that fear. However, until relatively recently there was little experimental evidence that this process occurs in people at an age when fears and phobias are known to develop.  This talk will outline an experimental paradigm demonstrating that fears can be vicariously learned during childhood and that, like Pavlovian conditioning, this type of learning is underpinned by associative learning processes. I will also discuss how the procedure has been used to investigate fear prevention and reversal interventions/mechanisms. 

Biography: Chris Askew is a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at Kingston University. His research area is child psychopathology and most of his work focuses on investigating the development of dysfunctional fear, anxiety and disgust during childhood. Chris’s recent research projects have included testing interventions that can be used to prevent negative dysfunctional emotions from developing during vicarious learning. 

  

Research Seminar: Prof. Margarete Boos (University of Göttingen, Germany)

***EVERYONE WELCOME, NO NEED TO BOOK***
 
Date: Thursday 14th April 
Location: Town Hall Committee Room 3 
Time: 12:00-13:00

Title: "Followership and the Emergence of Leadership"

Traditional leadership theories in psychology focus on traits and behavioural styles of leaders. Newer approaches award strong situational contingency to leadership. Remarkably, traditional and newer psychological approaches neglected the impact of followers on leadership. In contrast, biological leadership theory, with its strong focus on open behaviour, incorporates follower behaviour and associated feedbacks on leaders.

Our aim is to contribute a novel approach that connects both disciplines showing how leaders in a human group emerge and how they depend on followership. We use an experimental paradigm - the HoneyComb© computer-based multi-client game (Boos, Pritz, Lange & Belz, 2014) - where initiating of and leading as well as following in a group’s collective movement can be measured.

We investigated ten-person-groups moving on a virtual playfield where each participant was represented as an avatar. We ran several experiments in order to compare the impact of different situational conditions on the leader-follower behaviour of participants.

Our method was to determine whether group members showed leader- or follower profiles (L-F profiles) during group movement, whether these profiles can be clearly defined and whether individuals switch their behaviour from leading to following and vice versa during group movement.

Boos, M., Pritz, J., Lange, S. & Belz, M. (2014). Leadership in moving human group. PLOS Computational Biology. http://www.ploscompbiol.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003541

 

Early parenthood experiences of infertile couples after successful fertility treatment: SRIP award

Olga van den Akker and Helen Allan with colleagues at De Montfort (Lorraine Culley), Dundee (Andrew Symon) and Flinders University in Austraila (Sheryl de Lacey) have won a Society for Reproductive and Infant Psychology developmental grant award (http://www.srip.ac.uk/)  to run a workshop to develop a collaborative team to investigate the implications of IVF/ICSI conception and delivery of a baby for couples' lives in early parenthood. 

This topic is underexplored in the literature internationally. There is a potential health need identified in existing research but ignored by policy makers although acknowledged by service users in the UK. We will address this gap in research with our focus on transition to early parenthood for infertile couples, on fatherhood as well as motherhood and on our use of mixed methods as an interdisciplinary team which includes a strong service user perspective. This work has relevance both nationally and internationally.

New CATS grant - Police Knowledge Fund

CATs has been successful in a new grant. This was written by Jeffrey DeMarco for the Police Knowledge Fund and concerns evaluation of the Volunteer Police Cadet programme.  This seeks to engage teenagers and reduce rates of antisocial behaviour. Julia Davidson is PI and Jeffrey and Toni Bifulco are Co-Is. Jeffrey studied this group (and others) when devising his Trust in Authority Questionnaire (TAQ) for his PhD (which Toni supervised at RHUL) and this is a really good operational use of it.

The grant includes underpinning the cadet group so is for 1.2m. The evaluation part to Mdx is for £350K over the 2 years, split between Criminology and Psychology.

Research Seminar: Prof. Raymond Klein (Dalhousie University, Canada)

***EVERYONE WELCOME, NO NEED TO BOOK***

Date: Thursday 31st March
Location: Town Hall Committee Room 3
Time: 12:00-13:00
Title: "Eye Movement Control and Covert Attention: Embodied or Disembodied Cognition?"

Raymond Klein is a cognitive psychologist whose research is dominated by the concept of attention. He considers himself a neo-Hebbian in the sense that he recognizes that the brain is the organ of mind, and values theories that seek to generate psychological processes in neural networks. In particular, he has recently become involved in applying the methods and findings of human experimental psychology to real world problems of individuals such as those suffering from dyslexia, attention deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), Parkinson's disease, problem gambling, and brain damage because of stroke; and to real-world issues such as counterfeit detection, eyewitness testimony, road and offshore safety. Ray has kindly agreed to come along to Middlesex University and discuss his work on eye movement control and covert attention.

Biography:

With publications in Science, Nature, and Trends in Cognitive Science Professor Raymond Klein has an impressive research record. He has an h-index of 57 and has been cited over 15,000 times, over 6000 times since 2011 (Google scholar). He is on the editorial boards of several journals such as JEP:HPP, Can. JEP, and Attention Perc. & Psychophys. Ray helped Mel Goodale establish The Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science (CSBBCS) and was its second President in 1993-4. In 2008 Ray was honoured to receive the society's highest academic honour, the D. O. Hebb Award and in 2012 was honoured to receive its Richard C. Tees Distinguished Leadership Award. In 2011 he was inducted as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. He has been at Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia (Canada) since 1974.

https://scholar.google.ca/citations?user=gP3fEvgAAAAJ&hl=en

http://www.dal.ca/faculty/science/psychology_neuroscience/faculty-staff/our-faculty/raymond-klein.html