2016/2017 Seminar Series
Sept 14th
Name: Sarah Skeen
Host: Michelle St. Clair
Oct 5th
Sarah Halligan
Host (internal)
Title: Risk (or resilience?) in the offspring of postnatally depressed mothers.
Oct 19th
Dr Vicky Williamson
Host: Michelle
Title: That tune that gets stuck in your head.
Nov 2nd (Janet not available)
Name: Helen Bould
Host: Kate Button
"Targeting body dissatisfaction through perceptual training"
Nov 16th – Joe Brooks
Host: Michael Proulx
Joseph L. Brooks
School of Psychology & Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience & Cognitive Systems
University of Kent, UK
Title: More than mere association: Unifying Gestalt ideas of perceptual grouping and figureground organisation
Perceptual grouping and figure-ground organisation are classic topics in perceptual
psychology and fundamental processes for determining how we see and attend to the world.
However, despite often being discussed and taught together as introductory Gestalt
topics, there has surprisingly been little study of actual mechanistic relationships between
them. Indeed, theories of perception typically treat them as separate processes
and they have been popularised through different well-known visual phenomena (e.g.,
grouping = grids of dots grouped into rows or columns; figure-ground = faces vase
ambiguous image). I will describe my recent work which supports the idea that these two
seemingly different visual phenomena may actually be deeply related. In particular, I will
describe two new broad principles, edge-region grouping and inter-edge grouping, which
demonstrate how figure-ground organisation can be described as a special case of perceptual
grouping. I will also demonstrate how grouping operations are critical for global/contextual
effects within figure-ground organisation and how these can be selectively disrupted in
a neuropsychological patient with grouping impairments. This work demonstrates
that grouping and figure-ground organisation are more than mere siblings within
Gestalt/perceptual psychology and provides some initial steps towards understanding
their mechanistic overlaps and interactions. We will need to reconsider how we teach these
topics and how we discuss them in research contexts.
Nov 30th - Bhisma Chakrabarti
Host: Chris Ashwin
Dec 7th - Liz Pellicano from UCL (CAAR talk)
Host: Chris Ashwin
Dec 14th - NO DEPT SEMINAR
Jan 11th – Brian Rogers
Host: Janet Bultitude
Jan 25th
Name: Paul Salkovskis
Host: Internal
Title: Worried Sick: the relevance of understanding and treating health anxiety in medical
settings
Feb 8th
Name: Anna Rabinovich
Host: Tim Kurz
Feb 22nd
Name: Jonathan Evans
Host: Chiara Scarampi and Neal Hinvest
Title: 'In two minds: the origins of dual processing
March 8th
Name: Nicholas Hopkins
Host: Leda Blackwood
March 20th **Out of normal seminar timetable**
Name: Helene Loxton from Stellenbosch
Host: Maria Loades
March 22nd
Name: Caroline Flurrey
Host: Ed Keogh
April 5th
Name: Eamon McCrory, Professor of Developmental Neuroscience and Psychopathology
Host: Graeme Fairchild
April 26th
Name: Deborah Caldwell
Host: Kate Button
May 10th
Name: Olivia Maynard
Host: Sally Adams
Title: Using cognitive neuroscience techniques to develop effective tobacco and
alcohol health warnings
24 May 2017
Name: Stuart Wilson
Host: Hope Cristie
Title:
Suggestions from next year:
From Greg Maio:
“While I remember, one suggestion for next year’s departmental seminar series is Dr Stuart
Capstick ([email protected]) or Prof Lorraine Whitmarsh ([email protected]) or
both. They are at Cardiff working on an environmental psychology project called CASPI.
Other suggestions from the social-environmental domain include Prof Helga Dittmar (Essex), Prof
Geoff Haddock (Cardiff), and Dr Travis Proulx (Cardiff).
All of these people are individuals who would connect well with some of the work here, but I
understand the list of possibilities will be long and you’ll want to balance research areas while
aiming for speaker diversity (e.g., career stage, gender). “