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URL: http://talks.cam.ac.uk/show/index/30963
Updated: 26 min 36 sec ago

Fri 07 Nov 15:00: Title to be confirmed

1 hour 40 min ago
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Fri 31 Oct 15:00: Title to be confirmed

1 hour 44 min ago
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Fri 28 Nov 16:30: What does the high heritability of psychological traits mean for psychologists and educators?

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 11:54
What does the high heritability of psychological traits mean for psychologists and educators?

Behavioural genetics has a hundred-year history of pointing to the high heritability of psychological traits relevant to people’s everyday lives, and outcomes such as educational attainment linked to wellbeing and professional success. Recently, the availability of polygenic indices, derived from large-scale genomic studies, has brought behavioural genetics to the individual level, generating individualised predictions of genetic potential. This advance brings into focus the relevance of genomic information for both personal and policy decisions. The drawbacks of behavioural genetics are twofold: it tells us only about current population outcomes, not how they could be different under different circumstances; and it is relatively silent on the developmental mechanisms that deliver heritable outcomes. In this talk, I will use a computational framework to focus on developmental mechanisms. I will show how simulations of interventions to alter developmental outcomes for whole populations, which have been designed to show differing levels of trait heritability, can produce surprising results. These results point to the policy relevance of the notion of heritability itself.

Host: Prof Dénes Szücs (ds377@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 21 Nov 12:00: Bayesian Brains Without Probabilities

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 11:49
Bayesian Brains Without Probabilities

Over the past few decades, waves of complex probabilistic explanations have swept through cognitive science, explaining behaviour as tuned to environmental statistics in domains from intuitive physics and causal learning, to perception, motor control and language. Yet people produce stunningly incorrect answers in response to even the simplest questions about probabilities. How can a supposedly rational brain paradoxically reason so poorly with probabilities? Perhaps our minds do not represent or calculate probabilities at all and are, indeed, poorly adapted to do so. Instead, the brain could be approximating Bayesian inference through sampling: drawing samples from its distribution of likely hypotheses over time. Only with infinite samples does a Bayesian sampler conform to the laws of probability, and in this talk I show how using a finite number of samples systematically generates classic probabilistic reasoning errors in individuals, and how an extended model explains estimates, choices, response times, and confidence judgments in a variety of tasks.

Host: Dr Deborah Talmi (dt492@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 14 Nov 16:30: Naive Wisdom: Behavioral Evidence from Newborn Chicks

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 11:45
Naive Wisdom: Behavioral Evidence from Newborn Chicks

For many years, the scientific community neglected or even denied the existence of anything resembling a mind in newborn animals, whether human or non-human. However, since the latter half of the twentieth century, a series of seminal studies has revealed a dramatically different scenario. Today it is well established that newborn animals enter the world equipped with a rich repertoire of innate predispositions and skills that facilitate learning and enable them to successfully navigate their social and physical environments. In this talk, I will present an overview of research highlighting key aspects of the newborn mind, with particular focus on behavioural methodologies and findings in which I have been directly involved—chiefly investigating the newborn domestic chick, as well as extending some findings to human infants.

Host: Prof Nicky Clayton (nsc22@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 07 Nov 16:30: Subcortical Contributions to Speech and Language

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 11:40
Subcortical Contributions to Speech and Language

Up to 8% of children experience stuttering, and a comparable proportion struggle with developmental language disorder (DLD), a condition marked by unexplained difficulties in acquiring a first language. Despite their prevalence, the neural bases of these developmental conditions remain poorly understood. Using quantitative MRI , our work has identified distinct alterations in subcortical brain structures: elevated iron concentration in the putamen in stuttering, and reduced myelin in the caudate nucleus in DLD . These findings highlight separable subcortical circuits underlying motor control for speech and language learning. In stuttering, we combined non-invasive brain stimulation with fluency training to reduce speech disfluencies, linking behavioural improvement to functional changes in the putamen and connected speech motor cortex. In DLD , our results challenge the dominant view that the disorder stems solely from deficits in procedural learning circuits. Instead, we find involvement of additional subcortical learning systems, including the medial temporal lobe and cerebellum. Ongoing longitudinal studies are mapping how these neural differences shape developmental trajectories in speech, language, and brain maturation.

Host: Dr Mirjana Bozic (mb383@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 31 Oct 16:30: Trust in “Moral” Machines

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 11:35
Trust in “Moral” Machines

As use of artificial intelligence (AI) becomes more widespread, machine systems are increasingly required not only to display artificial intelligence but artificial morality too. AI is already used to aid decisions about life support, criminal sentencing, and the allocation of scarce medical resource, and so-called “moral machines” are even being thought to be able to act as “artificial moral advisors” by giving moral advice and helping to improve human moral decision making. In this talk, I will explore what it means to trust AI in the moral domain. Drawing on insights from social psychology and moral cognition, I will discuss how people conceptualise trust in AI, how judgments of effectiveness and ethicality intertwine, and how perceptions of intelligence shape attributions of morality. I will consider how people trust “artificial moral advisors,” and how people trust other humans who rely on AI for socio-relational tasks. Drawing on these findings, I will ask whether – and in what sense – we should place trust in ‘moral’ machines, and what kind of future we are willing to accept as AI takes on roles that shape not only our decisions, but our relationships, values, and humanity itself.

Host: Prof Simone Schnall (ss877@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 17 Oct 16:30: Mental Navigation and the Default Mode Network: From Spatial Maps to Conceptual Knowledge

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 10:44
Mental Navigation and the Default Mode Network: From Spatial Maps to Conceptual Knowledge

In parallel with other species, humans possess a remarkable ability to encode detailed spatial information about our environments, forming cognitive maps that enable inference and generalisation for goal-directed behaviour. Long linked to the hippocampal-entorhinal system, growing evidence now suggests that the neural mechanisms supporting spatial navigation also extend to abstract domains, involving a broader network of cortical regions. In this talk, I will propose that the default mode network (DMN), traditionally associated with mind-wandering and self-referential processing, plays a domain-general role in constructing and traversing cognitive maps: structured representations of relational knowledge that span both spatial and non-spatial domains. I will present recent findings from our lab using ultra-high-field 7T fMRI, showing how spatial learning and memory are encoded across the DMN during navigation in virtual environments, and how these same regions organize conceptual knowledge along interpretable representational axes to support abstract mental navigation. Together, these results suggest that the DMN implements a unified computational architecture for mapping space, memory, meaning, and value. This framework bridges classical theories of cognitive maps with contemporary systems neuroscience and offers translational insights into disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, where both spatial navigation and DMN function are compromised.

Host: Prof Trevor Robbins (twr2@cam.ac.uk)

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Fri 24 Oct 16:30: Revisiting Hebb and the Hippocampal Index in Humans: Toward a Neurotechnology of Memory

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 10:40
Revisiting Hebb and the Hippocampal Index in Humans: Toward a Neurotechnology of Memory

In this talk I will present two strands of studies where we investigated two prominent mechanisms suggested to underlie human episodic memory. First, Hebbian learning (i.e “fire-together, wire together”) or Spike-Timing-Dependent-Plasticity (STDP), which posits that the firing of neurons in close temporal proximity is crucial for laying down a memory trace. Recording the co-firing of single-neuron in epilepsy patients in the medial-temporal-lobe during a memory task we found results that are consistent with STDP . I will also show results from rhythmic stimulation studies demonstrating that the manipulation of temporal patterns in the range of milliseconds modulates episodic memory formation. A second idea that has influenced memory research is the “Indexing Theory” which posits that the human hippocampus stores episodic memories via an Index – an agnostic conjunctive type of code that points to the different elements that belong to the episode. I will present recent evidence from human single neuron recordings where we found neurons that are consistent with such an indexing function. I will also present unpublished results from an ultra-highfield fMRI at 7T which support these human single unit findings and suggest that the Index is predominantly located in the hippocampal subfield CA3 . I will close the talk by presenting a recent theoretical framework where we integrate these findings with Concept Cells (so-called Jennifer Anniston cells) and the Engram Allocation Theory. At the end I will speculate how results from both streams could lead to the development of novel treatment for patients with memory problems.

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Fri 17 Oct 13:00: Sense and Sensibility in Cognition: Unraveling the Neural Basis of Emotional Regulation

Tue, 30/09/2025 - 10:33
Sense and Sensibility in Cognition: Unraveling the Neural Basis of Emotional Regulation

In this Zangwill seminar, I explore how the brain regulates emotion—what goes wrong in disorders like depression and ADHD , and how we can measure affective states across species with increasing precision. From mouse genetic models of attention deficits focused on the developing hippocampus to neural signatures of pain-induced depression, we uncover how emotional dysregulation takes shape at the molecular, cellular, and systems level. For example, we consider the affective consequences of chronic pain, where both human imaging and rodent studies reveal early hippocampal changes, including enhanced neurogenesis and microglial modulation, as potential contributors to depression. We also harness deep learning to decode facial expressions in animals, revealing moments of pleasure, fear, and altered states—and extend this work to humans by tracking how young children express emotion and curiosity in natural social settings. Combining genetics, neuroimaging, behavior, and AI, this talk offers a multi-layered perspective on “hot” cognition and its neural underpinnings, opening new doors for early detection and intervention in affective and developmental disorders.

Host: Prof Trevor Robbins (twr2@cam.ac.uk)

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Thu 16 Oct 14:00: Towards realistic and understandable models of human speech processing

Tue, 23/09/2025 - 09:23
Towards realistic and understandable models of human speech processing

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Thu 16 Oct 14:00: Understandable language models

Fri, 19/09/2025 - 08:22
Understandable language models

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Thu 20 Nov 14:00: Building efficient & useful knowledge systems

Fri, 19/09/2025 - 08:05
Building efficient & useful knowledge systems

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Thu 06 Nov 14:00: A meeting of minds: Modulating mentalizing in autism

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:37
A meeting of minds: Modulating mentalizing in autism

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Thu 04 Dec 14:00: Reconnecting with the body: Repairing interoception in physical illness and mental health

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:36
Reconnecting with the body: Repairing interoception in physical illness and mental health

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Thu 27 Nov 14:00: The neurocognition of dance

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:35
The neurocognition of dance

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Thu 20 Nov 14:00: Talk title tbc

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:34
Talk title tbc

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Thu 13 Nov 14:00: How would I feel tomorrow: Towards a computational understanding of subjective pain experiences

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:24
How would I feel tomorrow: Towards a computational understanding of subjective pain experiences

Abstract not available

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Thu 02 Oct 14:00: Attention under challenge: Addressing the consequences of modern environments

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:23
Attention under challenge: Addressing the consequences of modern environments

Abstract not available

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Thu 23 Oct 14:00: Grasping the invisible: Multidimensional meanings for abstract concepts

Thu, 18/09/2025 - 09:16
Grasping the invisible: Multidimensional meanings for abstract concepts

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