BIRC Speaker Series
Speaker: Prof. Tor Wager, Dartmouth College

"A Psychobiological Investigation of the Effects of Parental Acceptance-Rejection on Caregiving Propensity"

Speaker:
Paolo Senese, PhD
Associate Professor

University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”, Italy

Assoc Prof Lihong Wang at the Dept of Psychiatry, UConn Health will give a tutorial on how to use FreeSurfer for quantifying brain anatomy using MRI scans. For more information on prerequisites and registration, please visit https://birc.uconn.edu/events/birc-lectures-and-workshops/ /birc-lectures-and-workshops/

Contextualizing brain signatures of vulnerability to health-risk behaviors in the real world

Dr. Theo Waters (NYU Abu Dhabi - Psychology): "A Cognitive Script Perspective on Parent-Child Attachment"

Presenter: Dr. Steven Rumery (UConn Alum/Director at the Leadership Research Institute)
Title: “Observations on the linkages between leadership, engagement and culture in not-for-profit organizations"

The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Marjorie Solomon, Professor and the Oates Family Endowed Chair in Lifespan Development in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the MIND Institute at UC Davis

Dr. Solomon will provide a talk entitled "Executive Control in Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms"

Abstract: Many individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit executive control deficits, meaning that they fail to maintain appropriate task context representations so they can inhibit impulsive responding, behave flexibly, and thereby effectively pursue their goals. Although individuals with typical development are thought to experience significant maturation of executive control processes during adolescence, those with ASD are thought to exhibit executive control impairments that persist into adolescence and young adulthood and are associated with clinically significant difficulties in social and adaptive functioning, and attention deficit, internalizing, and ASD symptoms. Given the challenges inherent in the transition to adulthood, it is critical to better understand the precise nature and development of executive control deficits in those with ASD, and their associations with behavior. This talk will briefly review behavioral and neuroimaging studies of executive control in ASD, and present new neuropsychological and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results from the first wave of a large longitudinal cohort sequential study of individuals with ASD and typical development ages 12-22 years. We seek to clarify the neural signatures of executive control deficits in those with ASD and to investigate how the development of executive control impacts the transition to adulthood in these individuals.

If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Solomon during the day, and/or coming to dinner Friday night, please contact Dr. Naigles: letitia.naigles@uconn.edu

You are invited to a Social Psychology Division talk by Dr. Mina Cikara from Harvard University on Wed. Sept 25 and 2 pm in Room 162, BOUS.
Her talk title and abstract follow.

Leveraging choice architecture to alter social preferences

Stereotypes and associated emotions drive discriminatory behavior across numerous consequential contexts. These biases against marginalized social groups have important implications for real-world social decisions, including hiring, voting, health, and housing decisions. Psychologists have traditionally studied how people evaluate different ethnic and cultural groups (and their members) in isolation, but in the real world people commonly make judgments and decisions over sets of people. For example, hiring decisions involve the assessment of multiple candidates at once. Across a series of experiments, we harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction—or choice architecture—can be used to influence decision-makers' preferences in consequential social decisions. I will review several findings including a combination of field data and lab experiments to examine the effect of alternatives, or decoys, on social evaluations and decisions in hiring and election contexts.

Talk Title: Leveraging choice architecture to alter social preferences

Stereotypes and associated emotions drive discriminatory behavior across numerous consequential contexts. These biases against marginalized social groups have important implications for real-world social decisions, including hiring, voting, health, and housing decisions. Psychologists have traditionally studied how people evaluate different ethnic and cultural groups (and their members) in isolation, but in the real world people commonly make judgments and decisions over sets of people. For example, hiring decisions involve the assessment of multiple candidates at once. Across a series of experiments, we harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set construction—or choice architecture—can be used to influence decision-makers' preferences in consequential social decisions. I will review several findings including a combination of field data and lab experiments to examine the effect of alternatives, or decoys, on social evaluations and decisions in hiring and election contexts.

Neurobiological Basis of Individual Differences in Reading