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Mind the Brain 2021
Mind the Brain: Brains in a COVID World
You can watch the full event here
Presenters
Dr Marwa El Zein
Marwa El Zein is a Wellcome Trust research fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (University College London) and at the Adaptive Rationality Center (Max-Planck for Human Development). Her research investigates how and why humans engage in group decision-making. She is particularly interested in applying her work to political decision-making and evidence-based policy change, as well as medical decision-making and mental health/well-being issues.
Title: Collective Behaviours During COVID
Talk Abstract: Why do we make decisions together? Deciding collectively helps us in several ways; it can improve our decisions, make us feel better when surrounded and supported by others, and allow us to share responsibility for the outcomes of our decisions. Marwa’s research investigates how being with others can help reduce some of the negative emotions generated by decision-making. This reduced emotional and responsibility burden is particularly relevant when decisions and their outcomes are uncertain, difficult, and stressful, as it has been the case during the Covid-19 pandemic. Marwa will present how our decision-making has been influenced by both the decisions made by the people surrounding us as well as by the lockdown regulations instituted during the pandemic.
Sara De Felice
Have you ever wondered why it seems so much ‘easier’ to learn from and with others rather than by ourselves (in isolation)? How important is the ‘social’ aspect of learning? During her PhD, Sara is trying to understand just that. She is working in the Social Neuroscience group at the ICN, where she uses different gadgets to look at behaviour, body movements, speech, breathing and obviously brains (!) when two people interact and learn from each other.
Title: Social Learning in the Zoom Era
Talk Abstract: The Covid-19 pandemic has forced many students to go online, making the question of whether learning without others matters even more for education and cognitive sciences. Sara conducted two experiments where participants engaged in Zoom videocalls, where they learnt about different items. Participants learned by interacting with the teacher or by looking at a pre-recorded video. Experiments varied by how much of the teacher was visible to the student (hands, face, or just slides). Participants then took a quiz immediately after and a week later, to see in which condition they learned more. It was found that participants remembered more things learned during interactive sessions. It may be that when we engage in social interactions, we use social cues (like faces) to learn from and with others.
Dr Lasana Harris
Dr. Harris completed his undergraduate education at Howard University, USA, and received post-graduate training at Princeton University, USA. Dr. Harris is a social neuroscientist who takes an interdisciplinary approach to understand human behaviour. His research explores the neural correlates of person perception, prejudice, dehumanization, anthropomorphism, social learning, social emotions, empathy, and punishment. This research addresses questions such as: How do we see people as less than human, and non-human objects as human beings? How do we modulate affective responses to people? How do we decide right from wrong?
Title: How a fear of contamination can hamper socializing
Conservationists
Prof Sarah Garfinkel
Sarah Garfinkel is Professor at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, where she leads the Clinical and Affective Neuroscience Group. She completed her PhD in Experimental Psychology the University of Sussex, before undergoing a training fellowship in Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the University of Michigan.
Current Research: Sarah’s current work focuses on brain-body interactions underlying emotion and cognition, with a particular focus on the heart. Adopting a translational perspective, she investigates altered cardiac-neural mechanisms in different clinical conditions such as anxiety, in order to devise novel clinical interventions. Sarah is also involved in the public engagement of science where she contributes to science programmes on BBC TV and radio.
Dr Sam Gilbert
Sam Gilbert is an associate professor at the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (where he has been based since arriving in 1999 to begin a PhD with Tim Shallice).
Current Research: Sam’s main research interests are the cognitive neuroscience of intentions, cognitive offloading, metacognition, and executive function.
Discussion Panelists
Dr Alex Pike
Alex was a postdoctoral researcher in the Neuroscience and Mental Health Group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience (UCL). She received her PhD from the University of Oxford in 2018; her thesis focused on compulsivity and eating disorders, and she was supervised by Professors Phil Cowen and Rebecca Park.
Current research: Alex’s current work, under the guidance of Dr Oliver Robinson, focuses on anxiety disorders. She uses computational modelling to understand how learning and decision-making might be altered in those who are more anxious.
Hugo Fleming
During his undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology at Oxford University, Hugo took on a project with Anna Mitchell looking at the role of the thalamus in schizophrenia. He realised at this time just how significant, yet simultaneously poorly understood, the cognitive aspects of mental health conditions are. He then took up a place on the Wellcome Trust Neuroscience PhD programme at UCL, now working with Jon Roiser and Oli Robinson.
Current Research: Hugo studies ‘mental effort’, the sensation of being engaged in mental tasks that seem to demand a lot of conscious attention and exertion. He is investigating why thinking feels effortful and aims to understand more about the situations and factors that give rise to effort. Many mental health conditions involve cognitive symptoms, so his research also investigates whether greater sensitivity to mental effort may underlie these symptoms.
Madeleine Payne
Madeleine Moses-Payne is a PhD student in the Neuroscience and Mental Health group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. Her work investigates development in the teenage years and why most mental health conditions onset during adolescence. She is particularly interested in how adolescents construct their sense of self and learn to reflect on themselves and others.
Current Research: In her most recent project, Maddie showed that 'metacognition', the ability to reflect on our own thoughts, feelings and behaviours, continues to develop through the teenage years. This metacognitive ability may drive our independence, in that it allows us to make better decisions on our own. Madeleine is interested in why, for some teenagers, reflections about the self may become particularly negative and incur risk for developing mental health conditions, such as depression.
Tayla MacCloud
Tayla completed her undergraduate degree in Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford, then moved to UCL for the Division of Psychiatry’s Clinical Mental Health Sciences MSc. For her dissertation, she conducted a randomised controlled trial testing a mobile app for depression and anxiety in students, and has experience working on randomised controlled trials of interventions for people with psychosis. She is now in the final year of her PhD, based in the UCL Division of Psychiatry. You can find her on Twitter @TaylaMcCloud.
Current Research: Tayla’s main research interest is in improving the mental health of young adults, and she is currently focusing on the mental health of university students. Her PhD investigates the mental health of students compared with non-students. Tayla designed and conducted the SENSE study (@SENSEstudy on Twitter), a longitudinal survey investigating how aspects of university life (e.g. students’ unique financial situation) impact students’ mental health, from November 2019 to November 2020.
Karel Kieslich
Karel is a PhD student on the Wellcome Trust programme in Mental Health Science at UCL, which he started studying after completing his medical degree at Charles University in Prague and an MSc in Cognitive Neuroscience at UCL. Prior to his PhD, he spent two years as a research assistant in the Neuroscience and Mental Health group at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience.
Current Research: In his research, Karel wants to focus on finding ways to better target mental health interventions to individuals. He believes that to do this, we first need to understand the mechanisms underlying mental health symptoms across different diagnoses and patients. In his most recent projects, he investigated the longitudinal effects of alcohol use on suicidality, and the role of hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in decision making. Prior to that, he worked on a series of studies looking at the cognitive mechanisms underlying the loss of motivation in depression, and the role of dopamine in these.
