Colloquium
LIGHTNING TALKS
Our first Colloquium Lightning Talks for the Academic Year 2024/25. We will hear from our PhD students and Postdocs. Please join us right before at 3:30 pm for cookies, coffee, and conversation!
A reception will follow the session in the Psychology Lounge. We will have the following speakers:
Ronda Lo - SPARQ Postdoctoral Scholar
Sparking Curiosity in a Click: Can Watching Short Videos About Other Cultures Cultivate Intercultural Curiosity?
In an increasingly intercultural world, how do we reduce the likelihood of cultural clashes and improve intergroup relations? I propose that intercultural curiosity may be an orientation that is important to cultivate before applying interventions. I will investigate the use of online, user-generated, short videos from social media as a viable way to cultivate intercultural curiosity in an authentic, non-threatening, accessible, and scalable manner. In my talk, I will outline potential ways to test this research question, present pilot data, and welcome feedback for the development of this project.Hope to see you all there!
Junyi Chu - Cognitive Tools Lab & Social Learning Lab Postdoctoral Scholar
Play for problems
Play is a universal feature of early childhood, easily recognized yet tricky to define. Why do we play, and what is it good for? In this lightning talk, I will introduce the idea that play in humans reflects a special kind of exploration, in which players are trying to figure out what problems they can pose and solve. I will illustrate this idea with behavioral studies of both children and adults at play, and end with some open questions on the nature and development of problem-setting behaviors.
Mira Nencheva - Language & Cognition Lab Postdoctoral Scholar
Infants track patterns of emotion transitions in the home
Predicting others' feelings enables efficient social interactions. How do infants learn which emotions precede and follow each other? We propose that infants develop this ability by tuning into the dynamics of their socio-emotional environment, in which they observe reliable patterns in how adults shift from one emotion (e.g., anger) to another (e.g., sadness). We measured infants' pupillary responses to video displays of emotion transitions and surveyed primary caregivers on the frequency of their own emotion transitions. Infants showed sensitivity to their own primary caregiver’s specific pattern of emotion transitions, in line with the idea that infants may learn how emotions unfold over time by observing their caregivers.
Cinoo Lee - SPARQ Postdoctoral Scholar
People who share encounters with racism are silenced online by humans and machines, but a guideline-reframing intervention holds promise
Are members of marginalized communities silenced on social media when they share personal experiences of racism? Here, we investigate the role of algorithms, humans, and platform guidelines in suppressing disclosures of racial discrimination. In a field study of actual posts from a social media platform, we find that when users talk about their experiences as targets of racism, their posts are disproportionately flagged for removal as toxic by five widely used moderation algorithms from major online platforms, including the most recent large language models. We show that human users disproportionately flag these disclosures for removal as well. Next, in a follow-up experiment, we demonstrate that merely witnessing such suppression negatively influences how Black Americans view the community and their place in it. Finally, to address these challenges to equity and inclusion in online spaces, we introduce a mitigation strategy: a guideline-reframing intervention that is effective at reducing silencing behavior across the political spectrum.
Rui Pei - Social Neuroscience Lab Postdoctoral Scholar
Bridging the Gap: Enhancing Empathy Perceptions Fosters Social Connection
Young adults face a rising tide of mental illness and loneliness. We propose that an overlooked barrier for social connection is how people perceive each other’s empathy. Our large-scale, longitudinal study (N=5,192) reveals that undergraduates who perceive their peers as empathic report better current and future wellbeing. Yet, we document an “empathy perception gap”: people systematically see others as less empathic than others see themselves. Students who perceived their peers as less empathic were less willing to take social risks, and grew more isolated over time. To disrupt this cycle, we conducted two field experiments that presented students with data on their peers’ self-reported empathy and behavioral nudges to encourage social risk taking. These interventions reduced the empathy perception gap, increased social behaviors, and expanded social networks months later. This work offers a promising, scalable strategy to cultivate social wellbeing—simply by presenting people with data about each other.
Shawn Schwartz - Memory Lab PhD Candidate
Real-time reorienting of preparatory sustained attention lapsing during episodic retrieval using closed-loop pupillometry
Successful goal-directed knowledge expression is modulated, in part, by moment-to-moment lapses in preparatory sustained attention (assayed by pupillometry/scalp EEG alpha-power) in pre-goal periods immediately preceding memory retrieval attempts. While theoretically informative, correlations between attention and retrieval success yield limited evidence regarding the causal role of attention lapsing on memory retrieval and constrain implications for whether moment-to-moment attention can be intervened upon to optimize performance. Here, we leveraged real-time readouts of trial-to-trial pupil diameter to trigger attention-reorienting probes just prior to retrieval attempts. After completing a goal-directed associative memory encoding task, 69 young adults (18-25 yrs) indicated whether they remembered test probes as having been encountered in one of two task goals during encoding. At the beginning of each retrieval block, we built participant-specific distributions of baseline-pupil during tonic fixation periods for trigger-thresholding. Critically, then, moment-to-moment pupillary dilations/constrictions which exceeded the empirical threshold triggered deployment of salient, real-time attention-reorienting probes just prior to retrieval probe delivery. As predicted, we found a correlation between hit/miss item memory and pre-stimulus tonic pupil diameter, and notably, attention-reorienting triggers on attention lapsing trials rescued performance (item-memory d’), returning close to that of control trials (those with no detected attention lapses/triggers), although there was marked variability in reorienting efficacy across participants. These initial findings set the stage for better understanding the causal mechanisms underlying arousal-based attention lapsing and its effects on episodic retrieval, as well as considerations for designing more personalized attention-reorienting interventions.