School of Psychology Events

Psychology Colloquium: Dr Daniel Feuerriegel (University of Melbourne)
2025-10-24 15:00 - 16:00 (Australia/Sydney)
Dr Daniel Feuerriegel (University of Melbourne)

Title: Where are the prediction errors? Three tests for expectancy effects on visual evoked responses

Abstract:

We can rapidly learn repeating patterns in our environment. These learned patterns are often used to form expectations about future sensory events. Several influential predictive coding models posit that stimulus-evoked neural responses in the visual system are reduced when an expected stimulus appears (expectation suppression). However, there is currently scant electrophysiological evidence for genuine expectation suppression in the visual system when relevant confounds are taken into account. To provide stronger tests for expectation suppression in the visual system, we performed three predictive cueing experiments (n=48, n=48, n=60) while recording electroencephalographic (EEG) data. Participants learned cue-stimulus associations during a training session and were then exposed to the same cue-stimulus pairs in a subsequent experiment. Experiment 1 presented faces, whereas experiments 2 and 3 presented oriented gratings. Across the three experiments we did not find evidence that expectations influenced event-related potentials in the first 300ms after stimulus onset (i.e., during afferent visual responses). These findings do not support predictive coding-based accounts that specify reduced prediction error signalling when perceptual expectations are fulfilled. Our results instead highlight the role of other hypothesised processes that allow our minds to adapt to our environments, which do not appeal to prediction error signalling modulations.

Bio:

Dr. Daniel Feuerriegel is an ARC DECRA Fellow and Head of the Prediction and Decision-Making Lab at the University of Melbourne. He uses a variety of neuroimaging techniques in combination with psychophysics and computational modelling to investigate how decision-making and visual perception are implemented within the human brain. His team uses high temporal resolution recording methods, such as scalp and stereotactic EEG, to track the formation of decisions as they unfold over time. His research group is also interested in how our past experience and expectations about future events shape responses of stimulus-selective neurons within the visual system.

Psychology Colloquium: A/Prof Yoel Inbar (University of Toronto)
2025-10-31 15:00 - 16:00
A/Prof Yoel Inbar (University of Toronto)

Title: Moral Language Use By U.S. Political Elites

Abstract:

Politicians on the left and right vary in the extent to which they moralize social issues. Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits five moral foundations said to constitute the basic building blocks of morality across cultures: the “individualizing” foundations of harm and fairness, and the “binding” foundations of ingroup loyalty, respect for authority, and purity. Past self-report studies suggest that conservatives endorse the binding foundations more strongly than liberals do. However, research does not consistently show that moral language use differs by ideology as predicted by MFT. I’ll present a series of studies in which we use computer-aided natural language analyses to uncover moral language used by U.S. Members of Congress. I’ll discuss differences between liberal and conservative politicians in how much and what kind of moral language they use, and how this changes across time and different issues.

Bio:

Yoel Inbar is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough and director of the Morality, Affect, and Politics (MAP) Lab. His research is dedicated to uncovering the basic processes underlying moral thinking and applying this knowledge to understand people’s ideology, beliefs, and reasoning.

Psychology Colloquium: Dr Jessica Flake (University of British Columbia)
2025-11-07 15:00 - 16:00
Dr Jessica Flake (University of British Columbia)

Title: Methodological Research Needs Methodological Reform Too

Abstract:

Psychology is in a period of methodological reform. Researchers are rethinking their practices, sharing their data, and trying out registered reports. In this open science era, my work has focused on the role of measurement practices. I’ll provide some background as to how that previous metascience and psychometric research in the context of replication studies led me to discover two related problems. First, even as registration becomes common, we lack practices to analysis plan for complex models and to ensure their transparent reporting and reproducibility. Second, current methodological research does not address this because it does not focus on how to navigate the garden of forking paths and quantify the uncertainty in results that comes from reasonable analytical flexibility. In fact, methodological research seeks to increase the size of the garden of forking paths! These problems prevent the uptake of open science practices and threaten the validity of research results. I’ll preview my on-going work to develop research synthesis methods for methodologies and ways of integrating multiverse analysis with metascience to quantify analytical uncertainty. I’ll discuss how applied and meta researchers can consider decision making in analysis pipelines as a unique contributor to the uncertainty of results and ideas for correcting for it.

Bio:

Dr. Flake developed an interest in psychology and statistics as an undergraduate at Northern Kentucky University and went on to complete a PhD in Measurement, Evaluation, and Assessment from the University of Connecticut in 2015. She recently joined the faculty in the Quantitative Methods Area of the Department of Psychology at University of British Columbia, after having been an Associate Professor at McGill University. Her lab works on applied problems in psychological measurement and psychometrics with an emphasis on reproducibility and replicability. She was a founding member of the Psychological Science Accelerator, a distributed laboratory network of over 1,000 researchers, serving as the Assistant Director of the Data and Methods Committee from 2018 to 2023. She continues to work on methodological challenges for big team science and psychometric methods for complex data structures. Currently she is an Associate Editor at Advances in Methods and Practices in Psychological Science and Psychological Methods. Her recent and future work is considering how open science practices like registered reports and multiverse analysis can be further developed for latent variable models.
