Details of previous seminars
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Date / Room |
Speaker |
Abstract |
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Tuesday 30th November 2021 Zoom Lecture and Reading Group |
Dr. Johannes Bruder Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel |
Optimal Brain Damage. “The assumption that connectivity is always a good thing is for me so naïve,” neuroscientist Karl Friston told his interlocutor in an interview on his approach to modeling the spread of the Covid-19 in the UK. “From the point of view of that delicate self-organization that enables these Markov blankets that constitute ourselves, or a society, or an ecosystem to survive, connectivity is the killer.” A remarkable, and politically momentous statement at a time when comprehensive connectivity seemed to be all there is, whether we think of global logistics, social media or more generally, the internet in times of “the cloud”. Yet, what critics were more concerned about was the use of theories and tools developed to study cognition in the brain for the purpose of analyzing the spread of Covid-19, moving almost seamlessly from populations of neurons to populations of humans. In this hybrid lecture/reading group, Dr Johannes Bruder will give a short talk, showing that such "epistemological slippages" have a history, and continue to influence how we think of human and non-human intelligence in the era of modern AI. |
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Friday 8th October 2021 Zoom Conference YouTube URL Coming Soon |
Keynote Speakers Dr. Emanuela Maggioni Dr. David Plans Prof. Miguel Nicolelis Dr. Timothy Brown PhD Presentations |
Sensation Sussex Conference 2021 - "Perception and Consciousness: From Biological to Computational Approaches" Beyond Seeing and Hearing: The Power of Olfaction in Multisensory Human-Computer Interaction Finding the Corporeal: design principles for interoception-based digital therapeutics Unable to attend due to internet issues Sensory Feedback in Assistive Robotics: Embodiment, Agency, and Self-Trust Itay Yaron, Kristjan Kaup, Carla Dance, Giulia Cabbai |
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Thursday 7th October 2021 Zoom Conference YouTube URL Coming Soon |
Keynote Speakers Prof. Liad Mudrik Assoc. Prof. Jaan Aru Prof. Floris de Lange Prof. Claire Sergent Prof. Axel Cleeremans |
Sensation Sussex Conference 2021 - "Perception and Consciousness: From Biological to Computational Approaches" Theories of consciousness: background, predictions, and empirical testing Cellular mechanisms of conscious processing How does our brain use the past to predict the future in visual perception? Distinguishing the neural mechanisms of conscious access from sensory processing and decision making Probing conscious and unconscious perception in the microsecond range |
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Thursday 24th June 2021 Zoom Lecture |
Prof. Bruno van Swinderen Queensland Brain Institute University of Queensland |
Using fruit flies to understand consciousness Although consciousness appears to be a hard problem to solve, it is likely that it evolved from adaptive brain processes already evident in insects. We study cognition in the fruit fly model Drosophila melanogaster and have developed new approaches to peer into its brain when it is sleeping or paying attention. I’ll be discussing how attention might work in the fly brain, and how flies might need distinct sleep stages to optimise cognition |
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Wednesday 26th May 2021 Zoom Lecture |
Prof. Joel Pearson University of New South Wales |
The Human imagination: visual imagery and aphantasia Mental imagery can be advantageous, unnecessary (aphantasia), to clinically disruptive and traumatic. It allows us to disconnect our senses from reality and test out virtual combinations of sensory experience. With methodological constraints now overcome, empirical research has shown that visual imagery can function much like a weak version of afferent perception. This talk will cover methods of objectively and reliably measuring visual imagery and the application of those methods to mapping out aphantasia (a blind mind’s eye). Further, I will cover some of the cognitive implications of having aphantasia, from memory and thoughts, to our emotions and show an overarching framework for imagery and the importance of understanding it. |
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Tuesday 11th May 2021 Zoom Lecture |
Dr. Bevil Conway Intramural Research Program NIH, USA. |
The neuroscience of colour and what makes primates special Among mammals, excellent colour vision has evolved only in certain non-human primates. And yet, colour is often assumed to be just a low-level stimulus feature with a modest role in encoding and recognising objects. The rationale for this dogma is compelling: object recognition is excellent in greyscale images (consider black-and-white movies, where faces, places, objects, and story are readily apparent). In my talk I will discuss experiments in which we used colour as a tool to uncover an organisational plan in inferior temporal cortex (parallel, multistage processing for places, faces, colours, and objects) and a visual-stimulus functional representation in prefrontal cortex (PFC). The discovery of an extensive network of colour-biased domains within IT and PFC, regions implicated in high-level object vision and executive functions, compels a re-evaluation of the role of colour in behaviour. I will discuss behavioural studies prompted by the neurobiology that uncover a universal principle for colour categorization across languages, the first systematic study of the colour statistics of objects and a chromatic mechanism by which the brain may compute animacy, and a surprising paradoxical impact of memory on face colour. Taken together, my talk will put forward the argument that colour is not primarily for object recognition, but rather for the assessment of the likely behavioural relevance, or meaning, of the stuff we see. |
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Wednesday 24th March 2021 Zoom Lecture |
Prof. Aniruddh D. Patel Dept. of Psychology Tufts University |
Consciousness and musical beat processing All human cultures have some form of music with a beat: a periodic underlying pulse which listeners perceive in rhythmic patterns and to which they synchronize movements when dancing. Even in the absence of movement, beat perception strongly engages motor regions of the brain, which are likely involved in predicting the timing of beats (for a recent review, see: How Beat Perception Co-opts Motor Neurophysiology: Trends in Cognitive Sciences (cell.com)). In this presentation I will explore some ideas for linking beat processing research to research on conscious content, conscious state, and conscious self. The aim is to generate discussion that could help shape future research in this area. |
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Wednesday 24th February 2021 Zoom Seminar |
Presenters Rhiannon Armitage Tomasz Korbak Mikkel Roald-Arbøl Nadine Spychala |
3rd Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations Understanding individual differences in sweet taste Scaling active inference Neural underpinnings of invertebrate sleep Measures of neural complexity and emergence related to conscious processing |
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Wednesday 27th January 2021 Zoom Seminar |
Presenters Jon Reus George Kafetzis Federico Micheli Will Roseby Beata Wozniak |
3rd Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations Alien Umwelts: The Perception of Otherness in the Aesthetics of Artificial Intelligence Systems Vision at the origin of vertebrate life Dissociating Top-Down and Bottom-Up Brain Processes in Conscious Perception A genetic approach to sensory neuroscience Investigating cues to colour constancy using virtual reality |
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Wednesday 9th December 2020 Zoom Lecture |
Dr. Andrew MacAskill University College London |
Control of feeding behaviour by hippocampal ghrelin receptor signalling His work focuses on the ventral hippocampus, an area crucial for learning and motivation, and a key node in the transition to mental illness. His team use a combination of in vivo and in vitro viral expression, two-photon microscopy, optogenetics, electrophysiology and behavioural assays to identify and characterise the neural circuitry underlying the generation of behaviour, and how this is altered in disease. |
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Wednesday 23rd September 2020 Zoom Lecture |
Prof. Charles Spence Crossmodal Research Lab Oxford University |
Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating Gastrophysics, the new science of eating, focuses attention on ‘the everything else’ apart from the food that nevertheless still influences the tasting experience, be it in the high-end restaurant or the home: Everything from the colour of the plate on which the food is served (and the gastroporn thereon), through the weight of the cutlery that is used to consume it (assuming that there is any, which can’t always be guaranteed these days), not to mention the music that happens to be playing in the background (sonic seasoning). Gastrophysics aims to bring the scientific approach, inspired by the latest insights from multisensory perception research concerning the roles of taste, smell, touch, sight and sound, together with the best in culinary artistry, in order to help design more engaging, more enjoyable, and more memorable experiences for diners in the future. I will describe a number of our recent attempts, using magic, visual illusions, and ASMR to deliver extraordinary tasting experiences to drinkers and diners. |
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Wednesday 22nd July 2020 Zoom Lecture |
Assistant Prof. Caroline E. Robertson Psychological and Brain Science Dartmouth College, USA. |
The limits of color awareness during active, real-world vision Color is a foundational aspect of visual experience that aids in segmenting objects, identifying food sources, and signaling emotions. Intuitively, it feels that we are immersed in a colorful world that extends to the farthest limits of our periphery. How accurate is our intuition? Here, we used gaze-contingent rendering in immersive VR to reveal the limits of color awareness during naturalistic viewing. Observers explored 360° real-world environments, which we altered so that only the regions where observers looked were in color, while their periphery was black-and-white. Overall, we found that observers routinely failed to notice when color vanished from the majority of their visual world. These results show that our intuitive sense of a rich, colorful world is largely incorrect. |
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Wednesday 20th May 2020 Zoom Lecture |
Dr. Annika Boldt Cognitive Neuroscience University College London |
Distinct and overlapping neural correlates of metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control Metacognition is the act of reflecting on one’s own mental states, often for the purpose of cognitive control. Previous research has shown that people can accurately report their confidence in their decisions and memories. Research has also investigated how these metacognitive signals are generated and which brain networks encode them. However, we are only just beginning to understand how metacognitive knowledge gets selected to optimise behaviour (metacognitive control). I will present data from studies in which I investigate how metacognition can guide people's decisions to cognitively offload, that is using external aids to reduce the demands of a task. In this context, I then show that metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive control share overlapping brain patterns using a multivariate analysis approach. |
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Wednesday 19th February 2020 Pevensey 1A6 |
Prof. Tony Prescott Cognitive Robotics University of Sheffield |
The Synthetic Psychology of the Self Synthetic psychology describes the approach of “understanding through building” applied to the brain and behaviour. In this talk I will illustrate the interplay between the synthetic and empirical traditions in psychology by considering the specific challenge of synthesizing a “sense of self” for a humanoid robot using biomimetic artificial intelligence. The starting hypothesis is that the human self is brought into being by the activity of a set of transient self-processes instantiated by the brain and body. I propose that we can synthesize a robot self by developing equivalent sub-systems within an integrated cognitive architecture for a humanoid robot. The talk will be illustrated using ongoing work to create a sense of self for a humanoid robot that has physical, temporal, interpersonal and narrative components set within a multi-layered model of mind. |
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Wednesday 22nd January 2020 Silverstone SB211 - Sussex Humanities Lab |
Presenters Sam Bilbow
Clémence Compain Sina Dominiak Jacapo Modoni |
2nd Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations Impact on human perception and expression, using augmented-reality technology as a medium for computational art Perceptual biases and metacognition during visual decision-making Plasticity of visual processing in primary visual cortex Putting the spotlight on taste: behavioural and optical interrogation of the neural mechanism of hedonic taste perception |
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Wednesday 11th December 2019 Silverstone SB211 - Sussex Humanities Lab |
Presenters Tessa Herzog Fiona Miller Isabel Maranhão |
2nd Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations Information encoding at the first visual synapse in the visual pathway Towards a therapeutic compositional model: can attributes of sound and music be isolated and composed to induce optimum HRV in PTSD sufferers? Sequence processing in dyslexic and non dyslexic groups |
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Wednesday 20th November 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Dr Peggy Seriès Computational Cognitive Neuroscience and Psychiatry University of Edinburgh |
Are Schizophrenia and Autism Disorders of Prediction? A growing idea in computational neuroscience is that perception and cognition can be successfully described in terms of predictive processing or Bayesian inference: the nervous system would maintain and update internal probabilistic models that serve to interpret the world and guide our actions. This approach is increasingly recognised to also be of interest to Psychiatry. Mental illness could correspond to the brain trying to interpret the world through distorted internal models, or incorrectly combining such internal models with sensory information. These ideas have become dominant in trying to understand autism and schizophrenia in particular. |
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Wednesday 23rd October 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Professor Adam Zeman Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology University of Edinburgh Eye's Mind Project
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The Eye’s Mind – perspectives on visual imagery For most of us visual imagery is a conspicuous ingredient of the imaginative experience which allows us to escape from the here and now into the past, the future and the worlds conceived by science and art. There appears to be wide inter-individual variation in the vividness of visual imagery. Although Galton, in the 1880s, recognised that some individuals may lack wakeful imagery entirely, the existence of ‘extreme imagery’ has been oddly neglected since his early work. |
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Wednesday 25th September 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Dr Romy Lorenz Cognitive Science Postdoctoral Fellow, Cambridge, Stanford, Max Planck Institute |
Towards a neurobiologically-derived cognitive taxonomy The classic taxonomy of cognitive processes was developed largely blind to the functional organization of the brain; therefore, classic cognitive tasks tend to tap multiple cognitive processes that involve multiple brain networks. Resolving this many-to-many mapping problem between cognitive tasks and brain networks is practically intractable with standard fMRI methodology as only a small subset of all possible cognitive tasks can be tested. This is problematic, as studying only a fraction from the large space of cognition can result in over-specified inferences about functional-anatomical mappings with a misleadingly narrow function being proposed as the definitive role of a network, concealing the broader role each network may play in cognition. |
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Tuesday 16th July 2019 Arts A01, Arts Hallway, Quiet Room (Meeting House) |
Keynote Speakers Prof. Andy Clark Dr. Katerina Fotopoulou Dr. Ryota Kanai Dr. Rosalyn Moran |
Sensation Sussex Conference 2019 - "The Predictive Brain: From Perception to Awareness" Bayesing Qualia: Consciousness as Inference, not Raw Datum Mentalising Homeostasis: The Social Origins of Interoceptive Active Inference Information Generation as a Core Function of Consciousness Active Inference in Gaming Environments for Computational Psychiatry. |
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Wednesday 12th June 2019 Pevensey 1A6
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Dr Jörg Fachner Anglia Ruskin University, Professor of Music, Health and the Brain, Cambridge Institute for Music Therapy |
Hyperscanning during music therapy, spontaneously emerging imagery and altered states of consciousness In Guided imagery and music (GIM) a therapist accompanies and guides the imagery of a client in order ‘to work on challenging life issues, for instance, disturbing old memories, losses, traumata, bothering health conditions, and relationship issues. The client (Traveler) reclines with closed eyes while the therapist initiates an altered state of consciousness (ASC) induction. The therapist (Guide) then chooses a pre-determined music program, or spontaneously chooses music to match the client’s imagery. As the music plays, the client describes any imagery, feelings, or thoughts. To analyse how emotions and imagery are processed and recognized, we employed a hypserscanning EEG, in which the brain activity during a real therapy session was synchronously recorded and identified moments of interest and Interrater overlaps of video ratings were then transcribed and submitted to an analysis of frontal brain activity over time. Here we were interested how the temporal dynamics of brain activity changed according to the emotional impact of the emerging imagery and how this was related to the therapy process. During the emergence of important personal visual imagery and dialogue with a significant person in the therapy, a shift of the frontal asymmetry indicated a strong emotional response in the therapist-client interaction. Peaks in Frontal Alpha Asymmetry (FAA) dynamics represented emotional peaks of intensity during selected moments. The shared emotional processing during therapy is fluctuating between negative and positive emotions, while challenging, negative emotions are related to therapeutic work on fear, anxiety and hopelessness. Directionality of FAA Peak dynamics represented shared emotional valence. Being in an ASC allowed associating more freely and gaining access to important imagery, however is not necessary related to positive emotions. |
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Wednesday 15th May 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Professor Marc Buehner Cardiff University, School of Psychology |
Temporal Binding of Actions and Effects: A measure of Sense of Agency? Temporal Binding (TB) refers to the mutual attraction in subjective time between a cause and its effect: Relative to single-event baseline judgments, people’s perception of causal actions and their outcomes systematically shifts in subjective awareness. Specifically, causal actions are perceived relatively later, while their outcomes are perceived relatively earlier – action and outcome attract each other in subjective experience (cf. Haggard, Clark, & Kalogeras, 2002). Because the majority of demonstrations of TB deployed intentional action as the critical cause, TB is now increasingly deployed as a convenient proxy measure for Sense of Agency (SoA). Moreover, reduced TB for negative outcomes has been interpreted to reflect reduced SoA for actions that bring about negative consequences: For example, reduced TB for penalties delivered to a peer when following an experimenter’s instruction (as opposed to under free will) is taken to show that coercion reduces one’s SoA for self-action along the lines of the Nuremberg defense (Caspar, Christensen, Cleeremans, & Haggard, 2016). In this talk I will caution against overinterpreting binding as tracking SoA with three arguments: a) Agency is confounded with causality and there is now ample evidence to show that TB is in fact driven by causality – Intentional action is neither necessary nor sufficient to produce TB; b) preparations such as Caspar et al. actually deployed causal structures where the coerced action would be expected to be temporally bound to the preceding command, thus reducing TB in any case; c) attempts to replicate reductions in TB for negative outcomes have failed. Binding is still an interesting phenomenon, however, and might be useful in offering deeper insights into temporal processing more generally. |
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Friday 3rd May 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Dr Liz Irvine Cardiff University Lecturer in Philosophy |
How (not) to measure consciousness Consciousness science presents an interesting example of the way that theory development is deeply entwined with the problem of how to measure or detect the phenomenon of interest. Different theories of consciousness often rely on different measurement procedures for consciousness and there is, as yet, no consensus about what the appropriate measurement procedures are. It is often suggested that better measures can be developed by rigorous comparison of multiple measurement procedures. In this talk I evaluate two comparative approaches, measurement robustness and calibration techniques, and argue that they are in fact of limited use here, and highlight general problems in applying comparative methods to develop psychological measures. |
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Wednesday 20th March 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Dr Tristan Bekinschtein Cambridge University Department of Psychology |
Meditation, hypnagogia and the stability of consciousness Seems limiting that we talk about phenomenology and experiences but then we measure reaction times and errors. Can we study the contents of our mind? I would argue that we are always studying content in psychology but not caring or not willing to engage in the question. I will present two main methods to capture what we think -direct and indirect- that may allow us to formalize the questions about content. I would also like to discuss two methods in cognitive neuroscience to map the underpinnings of the contents: neural decoding and intensity tracking. I will illustrate the results and discussion with EEG and fMRI experiments during pharmacologically induced states, sleep transitions and meditative techniques. |
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Wednesday 20th February 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Professor Sarah Garfinkel University of Sussex Professor in Psychiatry, Neuroscience and Imaging |
Hearts and Minds: Interoceptive signals guide emotion and cognition There is increasing recognition that cognitive and emotional processes are shaped by the dynamic integration of brain and body. A major channel of interoceptive information comes from the heart, where phasic signals are conveyed to the brain to indicate how fast and strong the heart is beating. This talk will detail how cardiac afferent signals can alter emotion processing and guide intuitive decision-making. Moreover, this interoceptive channel is disrupted in distinct ways in first episode psychosis, schizophrenia, autism and anxiety. This talk will provide empirical examples and suggest how specific interoceptive disturbances may contribute to our understanding of distinct symptoms, including dissociation and altered affective processing. Finally, new work will be presented on interoceptive training to demonstrate enhanced interoceptive precision following targeted feedback. The discrete cardiac effects on emotion and cognition have broad relevance to clinical neuroscience, with implications for peripheral treatment targets and behavioural interventions. |
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Wednesday 23rd January 2019 Pevensey 1A6 |
Professor Jamie Ward University of Sussex Co-Director of Leverhulme Doctoral Scholarship Programme |
Unusual perceptual experiences as a window into individual differences in the brain and cognition In this seminar, I will present the current state of knowledge about anomalous perceptual experiences in synaesthesia (e.g. experiencing colours for letters, tastes for words) that links together various levels of understanding from genetics through to brain structure, cognition, and perceptual experiences. Whereas other kinds of anomalous perceptual experiences (e.g. visual hallucinations in people going blind) are triggered via compensatory plasticity changes in the brain, due to unreliable sensory inputs, this is not the case in developmental forms of synaesthesia. If anything, their perceptual abilities are atypically good (on objective measures) and, moreover, they subjectively report higher sensitivity/aversion to sensory stimuli. The latter closely resembles a defining symptom of autism, and I present evidence that the two conditions are related. Enhanced perceptual functioning is one of several cognitive features that appear to be enhanced in synaesthesia (the others include memory and mental imagery). Finally, I will discuss why these anomalous experiences exist. I will argue that they do not convey any new information about the world (and, hence, have limited functionality) but are, instead, an emergent property of other adaptive design features. In effect, synaesthesia is not functional in itself but the underlying disposition towards developing synaesthesia may well be. |
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Wednesday 12th December 2018 Pevensey 1A6 |
Warrick Roseboom University of Sussex Sackler Centre for Consciousness Science & Dept of Informatics |
Why “intentional binding” is a poor measure of sense of agency – and how it might be redeemed Sense of agency describes the feeling that you are the author of your own actions. The academic literature on sense of agency has exploded in the past two decades following the discovery of an apparently implicit measure of agency called intentional binding (IB). IB refers to the subjective contraction of the temporal interval between an action (e.g. pressing a light switch) and its putative outcome (the light coming on), compared to non-self-intentional event pairings (e.g. observing someone else switch on a light). Recent work from our group demonstrates several key challenges to using IB to measure agency. First, IB dissociates from explicit judgments of agency at least as often as it doesn’t - including important cases such as sense of agency for group actions. Second, when appropriate non-intentional event baseline conditions are used, such as watching your own movements replayed from a first-person perspective in virtual reality without making any action, evidence for IB disappears entirely. Third, taking the differential sensory precision of action and outcome events into account in simple multisensory causal-binding models fully explains IB effects without appealing to intention whatsoever. However, other recent findings using IB in the context of post-hypnotic suggestion of involuntariness provide the strongest evidence yet that the experience of agency is reflected in IB. In sum, these cases demonstrate that the instances in which IB appropriately indexes agency are much more limited than previously assumed and provide clear direction on where future investigations of the phenomenology of agency should be conducted. |
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Wednesday 21st November 2018 Pevensey 1A6 |
Presenters Dennis Larsson Magdalena del Río Forster Filippo Torresan |
1st Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations Brain-body interaction underlying interoceptive awareness Individual differences in sensory sensitivity - links to autism and synaesthesia The Predictive Brain: From Presence to Agency via Counterfactuals? |
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Wednesday 17th October 2018 Pevensey 1A6 |
Presenters Philipp Kaniuth Carla Dance Joshua Hargreaves |
1st Cohort Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar Presentations The Sense of Agency - A closer look at Consciousness and Causality A ‘blind mind’s eye’: Visual knowledge in Aphantasia Exploring the role 'influential' behaviours which facilitate socio-temporal synchrony during musical joint action |