Thu 22 Feb 15:30: Exploring microcircuit properties for memory, from rodents to the human brain
Human brain function arises from a continuous activity flowing through specific cells, guided by intricate synaptic arrangements. Therefore, determining the architecture and properties of functioning microcircuits is crucial for understanding the complexities of brain function. However, our current microcircuit knowledge is limited, and for the human brain – almost non-existent. I will present our recent findings using a combination of multicellular patch-clamp-based circuit analysis and super-resolution imaging to elucidate the microcircuit architecture of the hippocampus, a critical brain region for memory. Studying the rodent brain at the individual cell level reveals distinct cell populations with unique properties and interconnectivity, which significantly enhance the computational capabilities. Furthermore, I will discuss how we apply these techniques to the human brain, exploring the black box of our own wiring, which reveals new insights into the circuit basis of memory storage.
- Speaker: Jake Watson, IST Austria (Klosterneuburg AT)
- Thursday 22 February 2024, 15:30-16:30
- Venue: Klug Seminar Room, Level 2, LMB.
- Series: Cambridge Neuroscience Seminars; organiser: Ingo Greger.
Fri 17 May 16:30: Language, Mind and Brain The host for this talk is Jeff Dalley
Abstract not available
The host for this talk is Jeff Dalley
- Speaker: Professor Johan Bolhuis, Utrecht University
- Friday 17 May 2024, 16:30-18:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology.
- Series: Zangwill Club; organiser: John Mollon.
Wed 21 Feb 14:00: Computational Neuroscience Journal Club
Please join us for our Computational Neuroscience journal club on Wednesday 21st February at 2pm UK time in the CBL seminar roo
The title is “Meta Reinforcement Learning”, presented by Luke Johnston and Theoklitos Amvrosiadis.
Summary:
Following on from last week’s journal club on distributional reinforcement learning, this week we examine another widely discussed topic within RL - that of meta reinforcement learning. Meta RL has long been of interest to neuroscientists for the extent to which it better reflects the macroscopic behaviour of animals, where the ability to generalise learning experiences across contexts (ie ‘learning to learn’) forms a vital part of higher-order cognition. However unlike traditional single task learning – where, for example, the mechanisms of classical conditioning are well characterised – the neural basis of meta-learning remains a source of debate.
We begin by taking a look back at the seminal 2018 paper from Botvinick et al. [1], which proposes meta learning to occur within a ‘prefrontal network’ centred largely in the PFC . Specifically, the authors postulate a two-part meta RL system that includes initial dopamine based learning by way of the classical cortico–basal ganglia–thalamo–cortical loop to shape the recurrent connectivity of the PFC network, followed by a second PFC -centred algorithm which is dynamically tailored to the task at hand.
In the second part of the journal club, we will look at a recent paper from the Komiyama lab [2], in which through 2-photon calcium imaging experiments in mice and computational models, the researchers argue that synaptic plasticity within orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is necessary for learning across sessions, but not for within-session learning in already trained subjects.
[1] Wang, J. X., Kurth-Nelson, Z., Kumaran, D., Tirumala, D., Soyer, H., Leibo, J. Z., ...Botvinick, M. (2018). Prefrontal cortex as a meta-reinforcement learning system. Nat. Neurosci., 21, 860–868. doi: 10.1038/s41593-018-0147-8 [2] Hattori, R., Hedrick, N.G., Jain, A. et al. Meta-reinforcement learning via orbitofrontal cortex. Nat Neurosci 26, 2182–2191 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41593-023-01485-3 (
- Speaker: Dr Theoklitos Amvrosiadis (University of Cambridge)
- Wednesday 21 February 2024, 14:00-16:00
- Venue: CBL Seminar Room, Engineering Department, 4th floor Baker building.
- Series: Computational Neuroscience; organiser: Puria Radmard.
Wed 24 Apr 15:00: Cambridge Overcoming Polarisation Initiative
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Ceejay Hayes and Yara Kyrychenko (Cambridge)
- Wednesday 24 April 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Tue 27 Feb 09:30: Child Development Forum Lent II
SPEAKER NAME : Jiayin Zheng
DEPARTMENT : Department of Education
TALK TITLE : Can we depict a comprehensive picture of children’s school readiness? The application of person-centred approach with a Chinese sample
SPEAKER NAME : Dr Kate Merritt
DEPARTMENT : UCL Institute of Mental Health
TALK TITLE : The impact of cumulative childhood trauma and obstetric complications on brain volume in young people with psychotic experiences
SPEAKER NAME : Dr Ceci Qing Cai
DEPARTMENT : UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
TALK TITLE : ‘Making sense of laughter in autism’
Child Development Forum are a series of talks bringing together researchers of infant, child and adolescent development across the University of Cambridge.
Talks are termly, and usually held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Chaucer Road).
Join the mailing list to kept up-to-date, and sign up to give a talk:
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/ucam-childdevforum
- Speaker: Jiayin Zheng (Education@Cambridge), Kate Merritt (IMH@UCL), Ceci Qing Cai (ICN@UCL)
- Tuesday 27 February 2024, 09:30-11:00
- Venue: Old Cavendish Psychology Ground Floor Seminar Room.
- Series: Child Development Forum (CDF); organiser: Giacomo.
Wed 21 Feb 15:00: How Can the Behavioral Sciences Inform the Climate Crisis Response?
The climate crisis is one of humanity’s most consequential and challenging threats, and addressing it requires massive behavioral and structural changes. As such, the behavioral sciences can play a critical role in this effort, through large-scale interventions and policy innovations. Following a unifying theoretical framework and leveraging a large array of methods, I investigate avenues in which the behavioral sciences can inform the climate crisis response, by changing false beliefs and stimulating climate action at the individual, collective, and system level. At the individual level, I use behavioral experiments to explore belief change strategies leveraging cognitive processes such as mnemonic accessibility, prediction errors, and emotional arousal, that can be used to decrease the prevalence of climate misinformation. At the collective level, I use social network analysis to investigate emergent properties of collective beliefs, such as synchronization and polarization, to maximize the effectiveness of individual interventions deployed in communities. At the system level, I investigate cycles of climate denialism propagation between society and artificial intelligence algorithms. Finally, to link conceptual processes to their behavioral signatures, I take a global megastudy approach to empirically test the relative effectiveness of the main theoretically informed behavioral interventions at stimulating collective climate action in 63 countries. Together, these theoretical insights spanning individual, collective, and systemic levels of analyses aim to inform policy and streamline the behavioral sciences’ response to the climate crisis.
- Speaker: Madalina Vlasceanu (New York University)
- Wednesday 21 February 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 28 Feb 15:00: When Curiosity Gaps Backfire: Effects of Headline Concreteness on Information Selection Decisions
Journalists often use curiosity-inducing tactics in headlines to maximally appeal to readers, yet studies do not consistently show that clickbait techniques yield more engagement. In this talk, I tie headline strategies back to psychological theories about the information gap — the belief that curiosity is piqued when people are made aware of a gap in their knowledge. I introduce the Upworthy Research Archive, a large-scale corpus of A/B-tested news headlines that enables testing the causal effect of linguistics cues on reader behavior. By modeling the amount of information conveyed in a headline using an automated measured of sentence concreteness, I show that that there can be too much, or too little, information conveyed in a headline. I argue that computer scientists and communication scholars should rethink the binary nature of clickbait headlines in light of these findings.
Teams Meeting ID: 329 287 585 675 Passcode: yKwfhf
- Speaker: Marianne Simone Aubin Le Quere (Cornell University)
- Wednesday 28 February 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 06 Mar 15:00: Student Spotlight: Yan Xia, James Ackland, and Nikolay Petrov
This talk is open to the general public.
Meeting ID: 329 287 585 675
Passcode: yKwfhf
Yan Xia (Aalto University):
Title: Integrated or Segregated? User Behavior Change after Cross-Party Interactions on Reddit
Abstract: It is a widely shared concern that social media reinforces echo chambers of like-minded users and exacerbates political polarization. While fostering interactions across party lines is recognized as an important strategy to break echo chambers, there is a lack of empirical evidence on whether users will actually become more integrated or instead more segregated following such interactions on real social media platforms. We fill this gap by inspecting how users change their community participation after receiving a cross-party reply in the U.S. politics discussion on Reddit. More specifically, we investigate if their participation increases in communities of the opposing party, or in communities of their own party. We find that receiving a reply is significantly associated with increased user activity in both types of communities; when the reply is a cross-party one, the activity boost in cross-party communities is weaker. Nevertheless, compared with the case of receiving no reply, users are still significantly more likely to increase their participation in cross-party communities after receiving a cross-party reply. Our results therefore hint at a depolarization effect of cross-party interactions that better integrate users into discussions of the opposing side.
James Ackland (Cambridge):
TBD
Nikolay Petrov (Cambridge):
Title: Limited ability of LLMs to simulate human psychological behaviours: an in-depth psychometric analysis
Abstract The humanlike responses of Large Language Models (LLMs) have prompted social scientists to investigate whether LLMs can be used to simulate human participants in experiments, opinion polls and surveys. Of central interest in this line of research has been mapping out the psychological profile of LLMs by prompting them to respond to standardized questionnaires. The conflicting findings of this research are unsurprising given that going from LLMs’ text responses on surveys to mapping out underlying, or latent, traits is no easy task. To address this, we use psychometrics, the science of psychological measurement. In this study, we prompt OpenAI’s flagship models, GPT -3.5 and GPT -4, by asking them to assume different personas and respond to a range of standardized measures of personality constructs. We used two kinds of persona descriptions: either generic (5 random person descriptions) or specific (mostly demographics of actual humans from a large-scale human dataset). We found that using generic persona descriptions, more powerful models, such as GPT -4, show promising abilities to respond coherently, and similar to human norms, but both models failed miserably in assuming specific personas, described using demographic variables. We conclude that, currently, when LLMs are prompted to simulate specific human(s), they cannot represent latent traits and thus their responses fail to generalize across tasks.
- Speaker: Yan Xia (Aalto University), James Ackland (Cambridge), and Nikolay Petrov (Cambridge)
- Wednesday 06 March 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Nick Mackintosch Room, Department of Psychology, Downing Site.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Mon 11 Mar 11:00: Psychological Intergroup Interventions: The Motivation Challenge NOTE: This talk is on Monday at 11 am !
Social scientists have increasingly applied insights from descriptive research to develop psychological interventions aimed at improving intergroup relations. These interventions have achieved marked success in lab and field studies—reducing prejudicial attitudes and affective polarization, fostering support for conciliatory social policies, and promoting peace-building behaviors. At the same time, intergroup conflict continues to rage in part because individuals often lack motivation to engage with these promising interventions. So far, much time and effort has been devoted to designing effective intervention content that produces psychological change, but less attention has been paid to this “motivational challenge.” We take a step toward addressing this imbalance by developing a conceptual framework of methods by which social scientists can deliver the core content of their intergroup interventions to an unmotivated target audience. Along with (a) directly motivating targets by getting them on board with the intervention’s ultimate aim, researchers can deliver the core intervention content by (b) tapping into other psychological motivations of the target audience, (c) embedding the core content in other attractive features of the intervention unrelated to the conflict, or (d) bypass motivational barriers entirely by delivering the intervention outside of targets’ conscious awareness. We define each method and use illustrative examples to organize them into a conceptual framework, before concluding with implications and future directions.
NOTE: This talk is on Monday at 11 am !
- Speaker: Eran Halperin (Hebrew University)
- Monday 11 March 2024, 11:00-12:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 20 Mar 16:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Gordon Brown (University of Warwick)
- Wednesday 20 March 2024, 16:00-17:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 01 May 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Brooke Rogers (King's College London)
- Wednesday 01 May 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 08 May 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Julia Ebner (Cambridge)
- Wednesday 08 May 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 22 May 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Brent Lee
- Wednesday 22 May 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 05 Jun 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Agnieszka Wykowska (Italian Institute of Technology)
- Wednesday 05 June 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Wed 12 Jun 15:00: Title to be confirmed
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Michal Kosinski (Stanford University)
- Wednesday 12 June 2024, 15:00-16:00
- Venue: Ground Floor Lecture Theatre, Department of Psychology, Downing Site, Cambridge.
- Series: Social Psychology Seminar Series (SPSS); organiser: Yara Kyrychenko.
Fri 23 Feb 13:00: Consistent Validation for Predictive Methods in Spatial Settings
Spatial prediction tasks are key to weather forecasting, studying air pollution, and other scientific endeavors. Determining how much to trust predictions made by statistical or physical methods is essential for the credibility of scientific conclusions. Unfortunately, classical approaches for validation fail to handle mismatch between locations available for validation and (test) locations where we want to make predictions. This mismatch is often not an instance of covariate shift (as commonly formalized) because the validation and test locations are fixed (e.g., on a grid or at select points) rather than i.i.d. from two distributions. In the present work, we formalize a check on validation methods: that they become arbitrarily accurate as validation data becomes arbitrarily dense. We show that classical and covariate-shift methods can fail this check. We instead propose a method that builds from existing ideas in the covariate-shift literature, but adapts them to the validation data at hand. We prove that our proposal passes our check. And we demonstrate its advantages empirically on simulated and real data.
- Speaker: David Burt, MIT
- Friday 23 February 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Cambridge University Engineering Department, CBL Seminar room BE4-38..
- Series: Machine Learning @ CUED; organiser: Dr R.E. Turner.
Fri 23 Feb 13:00: Consistent Validation for Predictive Methods in Spatial Settings
Spatial prediction tasks are key to weather forecasting, studying air pollution, and other scientific endeavors. Determining how much to trust predictions made by statistical or physical methods is essential for the credibility of scientific conclusions. Unfortunately, classical approaches for validation fail to handle mismatch between locations available for validation and (test) locations where we want to make predictions. This mismatch is often not an instance of covariate shift (as commonly formalized) because the validation and test locations are fixed (e.g., on a grid or at select points) rather than i.i.d. from two distributions. In the present work, we formalize a check on validation methods: that they become arbitrarily accurate as validation data becomes arbitrarily dense. We show that classical and covariate-shift methods can fail this check. We instead propose a method that builds from existing ideas in the covariate-shift literature, but adapts them to the validation data at hand. We prove that our proposal passes our check. And we demonstrate its advantages empirically on simulated and real data.
- Speaker: David Burt, MIT
- Friday 23 February 2024, 13:00-14:00
- Venue: Cambridge University Engineering Department, CBL Seminar room BE4-38..
- Series: Machine Learning @ CUED; organiser: Dr R.E. Turner.
Tue 27 Feb 09:30: Child Development Forum Lent II
SPEAKER NAME : Jiayin Zheng
DEPARTMENT : Department of Education
TALK TITLE : Can we depict a comprehensive picture of children’s school readiness? The application of person-centred approach with a Chinese sample
SPEAKER NAME : Dr Kate Merritt
DEPARTMENT : UCL Institute of Mental Health
TALK TITLE : The impact of cumulative childhood trauma and obstetric complications on brain volume in young people with psychotic experiences
SPEAKER NAME : Dr Ceci Qing Cai
DEPARTMENT : UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience
TALK TITLE : ‘Making sense of laughter in autism’
Child Development Forum are a series of talks bringing together researchers of infant, child and adolescent development across the University of Cambridge.
Talks are termly, and usually held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Chaucer Road).
Join the mailing list to kept up-to-date, and sign up to give a talk:
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/ucam-childdevforum
This talk is part of the Child Development Forum (CDF) series.
- Speaker: Jiayin Zheng (Education@Cambridge), Kate Merritt (IMH@UCL), Ceci Qing Cai (ICN@UCL)
- Tuesday 27 February 2024, 09:30-11:00
- Venue: Old Cavendish Psychology Second Floor Seminar Room.
- Series: Child Development Forum (CDF); organiser: Giacomo.
Tue 11 Jun 09:30: Child Development Forum Easter II
Speakers TBA
Child Development Forum are a series of talks bringing together researchers of infant, child and adolescent development across the University of Cambridge.
Talks are termly, and usually held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Chaucer Road).
Join the mailing list to kept up-to-date, and sign up to give a talk:
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/ucam-childdevforum
This talk is part of the Child Development Forum (CDF) series.
- Speaker: Abigail Agyemang (Psychology), Irena Tetkovic (Psychiatry), Keith Liang (Psychology)
- Tuesday 11 June 2024, 09:30-11:00
- Venue: South Pole Large Meeting Room, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Chaucer Road.
- Series: Child Development Forum (CDF); organiser: Giacomo.
Tue 30 Apr 09:30: Child Development Forum Easter I
Speakers TBA
Child Development Forum are a series of talks bringing together researchers of infant, child and adolescent development across the University of Cambridge.
Talks are termly, and usually held at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (Chaucer Road).
Join the mailing list to kept up-to-date, and sign up to give a talk:
https://lists.cam.ac.uk/sympa/info/ucam-childdevforum
This talk is part of the Child Development Forum (CDF) series.
- Speaker: Kelsey Graber (Education), Eireann Attridge (Education), Jessica van de Grint (Psychology)
- Tuesday 30 April 2024, 09:30-11:00
- Venue: South Pole Large Meeting Room, MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, University of Cambridge, Chaucer Road.
- Series: Child Development Forum (CDF); organiser: Giacomo.