Calendar of events
Thu 11 Jun, '26- |
After PhD: Finding Postdoctoral and Academic Positions 鈥� Language & Wellbeing1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, Psychology BuildingPart of the PG SSLC series of workshops for postgraduate researchers in Psychology. Speakers: Katy Stokes, Kirsty Green, Miriam Wuensch Register to attend using the link here: |
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Tue 16 Jun, '26- |
PhD Seminars for First Year Students - Students are Jing Gu, Wiki Jeglinska, Ihor Komnatskyy, Sarwang Dwivedi1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, New Psychology BuildingThe Department of Psychology will be hosting a series of First-Year PhD Seminar Presentations, delivered by current first-year doctoral researchers. These seminars provide an opportunity for first-year PhD students to:
The seminars are designed to be supportive and developmental, helping students refine their research during the early stages of their PhD. Attendance is encouraged for staff and postgraduate researchers, as the series also offers a valuable opportunity for knowledge sharing and engagement across research areas within the department.
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Thu 18 Jun, '26- |
Department Psychology Seminars: Dr Luc Boutsen, Aston University1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, New Psychology BuildingHost: Stella Qian Title: Why are you looking at me? Towards a cognitive understanding of the perception of facial difference
Abstract: It is well known that persons with a facial difference (e.g., an appearance-altering mark or condition) can experience adverse responses from others during social interactions. Distinctive and anomalous facial appearances may bias first impressions formed by observers, and this is rooted in evolved mechanisms of treat detection and disease avoidance. However, what levels of processing (attentional orienting, perceptual encoding, recall, trait attribution) lead to facial bias is less clear. Here I suggest that bias reflects the interplay between perceptual encoding of anomalous facial information, and mechanisms tuned to disease avoidance. I illustrate this interplay by results from experiments that evaluate recognition memory and trait inferences towards typical faces and faces with added distinctive features that could signal disease. Observers made binary choices towards individual faces (鈥淒id you see this person before?鈥�, 鈥淒oes this person look trustworthy鈥�), and response preferences and confidence, and response times were analysed. The results suggest that facial bias in recognition memory is rooted in a disruption to holistic face perception and an altered encoding effort, and that trait inferences to anomalous faces reflect response biases and differences in the accumulation of information over time. |
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Tue 23 Jun, '26- |
Department Psychology Seminars: Louise Connell, Maynooth University1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, New Psychology BuildingHost: Dr Matthew Mak Title: Sensorimotor semantics: how perception and action experience shape high-level cognition
Abstract: The cognitive sciences view concepts as the heart of cognition, yet it remains a matter of debate how we mentally represent concepts as diverse as cat, affection, and calculus. Grounded theories of representation hold that the same neural systems engaged during perception and action experience are also engaged when meaning is processed during conceptual tasks, thus providing a grounding mechanism for semantic memory. However, the contribution of sensorimotor information beyond the senses of vision and hearing (and to a lesser extent touch and smell) is not well understood, nor is the role of sensorimotor information in grounding abstract concepts. By incorporating a multidimensional variety of perceptual experience from a range of distinct modalities and action experience from a range of distinct bodily effectors, and doing so at the full scale of adult semantic memory (approximately 40k lexical concepts), we have tested grounded theories of cognition across a broad variety of cognitive tasks. From semantic similarity to visual word recognition to categorical structure, we find that the sensorimotor experience underlying conceptual representations plays an essential role in both concrete and abstract domains. Overall, these findings suggest that sensorimotor grounding helps provide humans with a robust, flexible conceptual system, where the distinction between abstract and concrete concepts is not as clearcut as ontological assumptions might suggest. |
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Wed 24 Jun, '26- |
After PhD: Finding Postdoctoral and Academic Positions 鈥� Behavioural Science1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, Psychology BuildingPart of the PG SSLC series of workshops for postgraduate researchers in Psychology. Speakers: Lucas Castillo, Yuqi Ye, Yunxiao Li Register to attend using the link here: |
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Thu 25 Jun, '26- |
Department Psychology Seminars: Dr Elizabeth Wonnacott, Oxford University1.61 Multi Purpose Room, First Floor, New Psychology BuildingHost: Olga Feher Title: TBC
Abstract: TBC |
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