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.
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: Hybrid: Centre for Family Research, Old Cavendish Building, Rayleigh Wing (ground floor).
- Series: Child Development Forum (CDF); organiser: Giacomo.
Thu 22 Feb 12:00: “Enhancing Insight into Neurodegenerative Disease-Associated Genes via Long-Read RNA-Sequencing”
Abstract not available
- Speaker: Dr Emil Gustavsson, University College London
- Thursday 22 February 2024, 12:00-13:00
- Venue: Seminar Room, John van Geest Centre for Brain Repair, Forvie Site.
- Series: Clinical Neurosciences Seminars; organiser: Louise Massara.
Mon 19 Feb 12:30: Resting State fMRI & Recent Advances
Will will stream ISMRM-23 “Advances in fMRI” Educational Course’s session on ”Resting State fMRI & Recent Advances” by Marta Bianciardi (Harvard University). Let’s watch it together and discuss it afterwards!
Abstract: In this course, we first describe the major networks defined in humans based on resting state fMRI. We then present methods used for static and dynamic resting state fMRI connectivity analysis. Further, we provide an overview of resting state fMRI applications in neuroscience and in clinical studies, including recent advances in the field. Finally, we discuss current limitations of resting state fMRI methods and future directions. The target audience includes MRI scientists, neuroscientists, clinical researchers, neurologists and neurosurgeons interested in learning about methods, applications and recent advances of resting state fMRI in humans.
Venue: MRC CBU Lecture Theatre and Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82385113580?pwd=RmxIUmphQW9Ud1JBby9nTDQzR0NRdz09
- Speaker: Marta Bianciardi (Harvard University)
- Monday 19 February 2024, 12:30-13:30
- Venue: MRC-CBU, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge.
- Series: CBU Monday Methods Meeting; organiser: Dace Apšvalka.
Mon 04 Mar 12:30: Harnessing Visual Studio Code for Your Research
Abstract: Join us for a mini-workshop ‘Harnessing Visual Studio Code for Your Research’. The workshop aims to introduce participants to the versatility of VS Code as a development environment that can enhance research productivity. Discover how to customise VS Code for your projects, manage code with version control, and leverage extensions for scientific computing and data analysis. Whether you are coding experiments, analysing data, or writing up your findings, this workshop will provide you with the skills to streamline your research workflow. Perfect for beginners and seasoned coders alike the workshop will equip you with the tools to bring efficiency to your research.
Venue: MRC CBU Lecture Theatre and Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/j/82385113580?pwd=RmxIUmphQW9Ud1JBby9nTDQzR0NRdz09
- Speaker: Máté Aller & Dace Apšvalka, MRC CBU
- Monday 04 March 2024, 12:30-13:30
- Venue: MRC-CBU, 15 Chaucer Road, Cambridge.
- Series: CBU Monday Methods Meeting; organiser: Dace Apšvalka.