SCHOOL OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY NEWSLETTER 2016
School of Experimental Psychology Newsletter
by [Article Author]
September 2015 – August 2016
From the Head of School, Chris Jarrold: It is my pleasure to introduce this year's version of our annual newsletter. The start of a new academic year is always a particularly exciting time, and we greatly look forward to the arrival of our new undergraduate and postgraduate students. It is also an appropriate point at which to look back and reflect on the past year's activity. Having just taken over from Jan Noyes, our previous Head of School, I want to pay tribute to all the Jan did in that role. The breadth of activity showcased in this newsletter, in terms of our teaching, research, and engagement activities, is fitting testament to all that she helped us to achieve.
Selected Research Highlights Here we highlight some of the high-profile publications that were produced by members of the School in the last year. Laura Wilkinson and Jeff Brunstrom - Wilkinson, L. & Brunstrom, J. (2016). Sensory specific satiety: More than ‘just’ habituation?. Appetite 103, 221-228. The three studies presented in this publication were conducted when Laura Wilkinson was a PhD student with Jeff Brunstrom in the Nutrition and Behaviour Unit, School of Experimental Psychology. Laura is now a Psychology Lecturer at Swansea University. The studies are about ‘sensory specific satiety’, which refers to the decline in pleasantness of a food as it is eaten, relative to another food with different sensory characteristics that is not being eaten. This is an important phenomenon to understand because it is thought to help bring about the end of a meal. However, it may also account for why ‘we always have room for dessert’!
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Olivia Maynard - Maynard, O. M., Skinner, A. L., Troy, D. M., Attwood, A. S., & Munafò, M. R. (2016). Association of alcohol consumption with perception of attractiveness in a naturalistic environment. Alcohol and Alcoholism, 51, 142-147. In this work Olivia Maynard and her colleagues from the School's Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (TARG) investigated the relationship between objectively-assessed alcohol consumption and perception of attractiveness in naturalistic drinking environments, by conducting an observational study simultaneously across three public houses in Bristol. Participants rated the attractiveness of face stimuli, after which their expired breath alcohol concentration was measured. No evidence of a relationship between alcohol consumption and perception of attractiveness was found, despite the large sample size, the successful translation of an experimental paradigm to a real-world setting, and the high level of public engagement with the study.
John Fennell – Fennell, J., Goodwin, C., Burn, J. F., & Leonards, U. (2015). How visual perceptual grouping influences foot placement. Royal Society open science, 2(7), 150151. Everybody would agree that our vision guides where we walk; but how does vision influence our movements when there are different solutions for possible foot placement? John Fennell, Ute Leonards, and colleagues from Bristol addressed this question using the Bristol Vision Institute Movement Laboratory, housed within the school. This allowed them to present, and measure performance on, a 'stepping stone' task in which pathways consisted of target stones in a spatially regular path of foot falls and visual distractor stones in their proximity. The results suggest that a bias in favour of visual grouping affects our choice of foot placement, presumably because, in nature, sudden changes in visual characteristics on the ground increase the likelihood of instability.
Claire Howarth – Haworth, C. M. A., Carter, K., Eley, T. C., & Plomin, R. (2015). Understanding the genetic and environmental specificity and overlap between well-being and internalizing symptoms in adolescence. Developmental Science, 10.1111/desc.12376 In general, individuals with more symptoms of depression and anxiety are less happy and less satisfied with their lives. In this paper, Claire Haworth and her colleagues investigated the role of genes and environments in explaining this relationship. Using a sample of 4,700 pairs of 16 year-old twins, they found that some of the genetic and environmental influences that are important for internalizing symptoms (depression and emotional problems) also influence aspects of our positive mental wellbeing (happiness and life satisfaction), but that wellbeing was more than just the absence of mental illness. This suggests that different interventions may be needed for treating mental illness and promoting mental health, and provides evidence to support the Government's efforts to improve both mental health and mental illness individually.
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Susanne Quadflieg - Quadflieg, S., Gentile, F., & Rossion, B. (2015). The neural basis of perceiving person interactions. Cortex, 70, 5-20. Observing people in each other’s company and making sense of their encounters, an endeavour sometimes referred to as people-watching, is widely known as an entertaining pastime. From a psychological perspective, however, this activity also signifies an impressive mental feat: By analysing mere appearances and overt behaviour, people-watchers form intricate impressions about those they witness without directly getting to know them. But how is this possible? This study shows that when looking at others, our brain easily interprets visual markers of interpersonal involvement, such as how close people stand to each other, whether they look or smile at each other, or whether they engage in direct communication. When these markers are absent or contradictory, however, brain areas of the so-called person perception network increase their activity in an attempt to reconcile and interpret the available information. This finding suggests that observers carefully attend towards the relations between people in their environment and hold clear expectations about what constitutes a meaningful social encounter.
Chris Kent – Kent, C., & Lamberts, K. (2016). Stimulus probability effects in absolute identification. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 42, 740-748. When people are asked to identify the position of an item in a sequence (i.e., is a tone that you hear the first, second, third, etc. in a series that increases in pitch), they find this task surprisingly difficult if there are more than 5 items in the sequence. In this, high-profile, paper, Chris Kent and Koen Lamberts (Warwick) examined whether this task could be made easier by presenting individual items more often. They did, indeed, find that items in the middle of the sequence were better identified when presented relatively more often than items at either end, a finding that suggests that performance on this task involves learning information about discrete items, and not just the overall sequence.
Steve Lewandowsky – Lewandowsky, S., & Oberauer, K. (2015). Rehearsal in serial recall: An unworkable solution to the nonexistent problem of decay. Psychological Review, 122, 674-699. In this paper, published in the flagship journal, Psychological Review, Steve Lewandowsky and his colleague Klaus Oberauer address the role of rehearsal - the internal repetition of to-be-remembered information - in working memory. Most existing theoretical accounts assume that rehearsal plays a role in supporting working memory, assuming that memories decay over time if they are not rehearsed. Steve and Klaus present computational simulations that show that many of the key, benchmark, findings from working memory tasks do not arise from a decay plus rehearsal model. They argue that previous claims that rehearsal supports memory need to be revised, and that future work should test the predictions of any account by using quantitative modelling.
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New Projects A number of new and exciting research projects were funded in the past year.
Jeff Bowers Leverhulme Grant Success Congratulations to Jeff Bowers who has been awarded a four-year Leverhulme Trust Project Grant. This four-year project aims to understand why some neurons respond to information in a highly selective manner. It comprises a series of four computer simulation projects that characterise the representations learned by artificial neural networks across a range of conditions. The findings will demonstrate when and why selective codes are learned in artificial networks and provide insights into why and when neurons respond in this way. A better understanding of the computational advantages of selective coding is fundamental to understanding how the brain supports cognition and will have important implications for theories in psychology and neuroscience.
Developing Alcohol Labelling Interventions: the ‘what’, ‘who’ and ‘how’ Alcohol significantly contributes to ill-health and death but it is currently exempt from the same standards of labelling required on food and nonalcoholic drinks in the European Union (EU). The EU Committee have called for an updated EU Alcohol Strategy for 2016-2022 to include mandatory strength and calorie information as well as health-related messages on product labelling. There is public support for increased information on alcoholic drinks, and evidence that labelling can lead to conversations around the risks of drinking and increased knowledge and awareness among consumers. The potential impact of alcohol labelling on behaviour is less clear; however, current labels implemented in voluntary schemes often fall below evidencebased recommendations. The Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group (TARG) is interested in how to optimise the content and delivery of alcohol labels to encourage healthier alcohol consumption. TARG has secured funding from the Medical Research Council, Public Health Intervention Development Scheme to investigate what information should be provided on alcohol labels, how information can be presented to increase understanding and relevance and reduce message avoidance, and who is most likely to be impacted by labelling interventions. The project will run in four phases: collecting information from the public and stakeholders, developing prototype labels, reviewing plans externally, and piloting a labelling intervention.
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Risto Kauppinen Awarded BRACE Grant for ‘Detecting the Earliest Hippocampal Changes in Alzheimer’s Disease’ Diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease early, before significant memory loss, will increase the potential benefit of future treatments that slow or halt disease progression. The hippocampus is an area of brain affected early in Alzheimer’s disease, resulting in memory loss. The hippocampus can be seen using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). International Collaborative studies have demonstrated that MRI of hippocampus is a useful way to identify patients with established Alzheimer’s and monitor the effects of treatment. Due to the development of new MRI techniques, we now think it might be possible to look in more detail at hippocampal structure in order to identify patients with very early Alzheimer's disease before significant memory loss occurs. Risto will scan patients with mild cognitive impairment and mild Alzheimer’s disease and hope to be able to demonstrate the very earliest changes in hippocampus such as change in the shape and characteristic MRI profile of the hippocampal subfields affected in Alzheimer's disease. He will measure the relationship between MRI findings and memory. Risto expects that as a result of his work he will be able to propose new MRI techniques that will enable early identification of patients likely to develop symptoms of Alzheimer's disease. He will also be able to apply these techniques to monitor disease in clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease.
Kit Pleydell-Pearce Awarded Givaudan Grant Current research on human olfaction being performed by Kit Pleydell-Pearce and Kristopher Magee is supported by Fragrance & Flavour Company, Givaudan. This collaboration seeks to understand the relationship between the sense of smell and a wide range of human behaviours and cognition. With a primary focus how olfactory stimuli can benefit well-being and mood, the research aims to examine the effects of different kinds of smells on the promotion of positive feelings and emotions and the reduction of negative feelings and emotions. Another area of investigation involves trying to understand how people think and feel about fragrances, scents and aromas. This work takes into consideration the kinds of words or phrases and semantic distinctions one might use to describe the qualities and characteristics of fragrances and also the kinds of feelings one might experience while smelling a fragrance.
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Teaching News Congratulations to our MSc and PhD spring Graduates On Wednesday, 17th February 2016, the School of Experimental Psychology celebrated the Graduation of its Taught Postgraduate MSc students. Several students and family members gathered in Goldney Hall to celebrate the occasion. Congratulations also go to the following prize MSc Prize Winners: Emma Craig, Serena Dillon, Hayley Ryan, Maren Muller-Gloode, Lois Coy, Ricky Wilkes, Sandra Weltzien, Alex Drake, Charlott Lienau and Christelle Van Antwerpen.
Congratulations to our Summer 2016 Graduates and PhD Graduates On Monday, 18th July 2016, we celebrated the graduation of our third year students and a few of our PhD students. Families from around the world came together and enjoyed this special occasion in the Atrium of Life Sciences with prosecco and cake. Congratulations to all of our BSc prize winners: Guy Proudlove, Luke Somerwill, Charlie Varley, Jodi Chiang, Jodie Rogers, Tom Gough Isabella Hunter, Agnieszka Ciborowska, Anna Rita Cunha-Harvey, Belou FoxFurniss, Hannah Deakins, Hannah Marsden, Hannah Sheehan, Jess O’Kelly, Jodie Burbidge, Kathy O’Brady, Leon Luithlen, Lucy Marshall, Luke Emrich-Mills, Penny Hao, Stef Martin, Tamara Willner, Tess Langfield and Tess Titmuss.
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Taking Stock of the 2016 National Student Survey This year’s National Student Survey (NSS 2016) data is now available. For us, as a School, the results are generally positive. Where they are not, they are encouraging. We are consolidating our position in several areas and improving in others. For us the treasured headline figure of “overall student satisfaction” stands at 84%. This is good and has improved by 4% from last year. This overall satisfaction is in line with Russell Group Psychology Departments (85%) and the University as a whole (86%). Nevertheless, we shouldn’t be complacent about this relatively good score. Overall satisfaction with a University course is determined by many factors. Some are beyond our control, such as the student’s social life, the experience of Bristol as a city and its culture. We can shape the academic experience and it is instructive to look at various NSS sub-sections to ascertain where our particular strengths and weaknesses reside. We will start with strengths, where we should celebrate those things we do well. We can then look at those areas where ours students want us to do better. Students identified two priority areas: (1) feedback promptness and (2) ensuring our feedback helps clarify the things they didn’t understand. We began addressing these issues last year. Josie Briscoe, Senior Lecturer, and Chris Kent, Lecturer, provided very useful insights into the student experience of longitudinal feedback at our Teaching Away day. Further progress lies in advance provision of mark return dates, improved communication about prompt turnaround times, and timely posting of excellent work on Blackboard: both before submission and immediately following the return of marked work. We also need to strengthen the role of Science Cafés by encouraging students to fully engage with feedback conversations with us and promote the greater use of “feedback plans”. Holding regular progress meetings with our tutees throughout their degree is another way to provide this personal touch. There is no obvious reason why this area cannot be as excellent as the others. So watch this space.
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Awards Olivia Maynard wins Academy of Medical Science prize Olivia Maynard was shortlisted from over 40 other Early Career Researchers to present her work on cigarette packaging and health warnings. She was asked to give a 20 minute talk on her research and present a poster at the University of Bath on the 22nd April and was selected as the winner. Olivia was awarded her prize by Academy of Medical Sciences Fellow, Professor Jonathan Slack.
Bruce Hood Wins BPS Distinguished Contribution to Developmental Psychology Award Bruce Hood was awarded the 2016 Distinguished Contribution to Developmental psychology by The British Psychological Society and delivered the Award Winners Lecture at the annual meeting in Belfast. The Distinguished Contribution Award is presented to a candidate who has made substantial contributions to research in Developmental Psychology or through Developmental Psychology to wider society. The latter may be in the realms of higher education teaching, changing government policy, communication of science to the general public or implementation of interventions.
Molly Russen Wins National Dissertation Award Molly Russen, who graduated last summer, was awarded second prize in the annual Jonathan Sime Awards. This prestigious annual award is given to an undergraduate dissertation which is deemed to have made a significant contribution to the field of people-environment research. The panel found Molly’s dissertation very interesting and provided some novel insight into perceptions of climate change.
Gretel Finch wins Best Poster Prize at the Daphne Jackson Trust Research Conference Gretel Finch won the Poster Prize at the 2015 Daphne Jackson Trust Research Conference with her work on “Factors affecting maternal eating behaviour: indications for postpartum weight gain and obesity”. Her work on maternal eating behaviour was highlighted in the panel discussion, and stimulated considerable interest in the poster sessions. The 2015 Daphne Jackson Research Conference held at the Wellcome Collection in London showcased the original research of 41 Daphne Jackson Fellows who have returned to their STEM careers following a career break. The poster judges’ verdicts were “very high quality, enormous diversity across STEM, difficult to choose, but unanimous decision on winner”. Gretel was presented with her certificate and prize from Maggie Philbin, CEO TeenTech, CIC (former BBC ‘Tomorrows World’ presenter).
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Impact and Engagement Marcus Munafò, Ute Leonards and Olivia Maynard Many congratulations to Marcus Munafò, Ute Leonards and Olivia Maynard whose work on the effectiveness of standardised tobacco packaging was highly commended at the 2015 Vice Chancellor’s Impact awards. The Vice Chancellor’s Impact Awards recognize innovative research that benefits society by enhancing quality of life, health and creative output, increasing the effectiveness of policymaking or public devices or fostering economic success. Ground-breaking experimental research at the University assessing the effectiveness of standardized tobacco packaging legislation has been strongly influencing international tobacco policy and legislation since 2011. Work by scientists in the School was the first to show, using direct, objective measures, that standardized tobacco packaging modifies relevant behaviours.
Inspiring the Ada Lovelaces of the Future TARG inspire the Ada Lovelaces of the future and give 100 pupils from across Bristol a taste of higher education at the University of Bristol On the 18th November 2015, shortly after Ada Lovelace day, researchers, students and staff members from the University of Bristol’s STEM fields gathered to discuss their work with year 9 pupils from local schools. The aim of the event was to inspire young people to undertake careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). The children viewed demonstrations and were given lunch before the winners of the poster competition were announced and awarded their prizes. The activities and demonstrations included a stall run by the School of Experimental Psychology where children were asked to share thoughts on research questions, discuss and draw their own health warnings for cigarette packages and were shown some of the equipment used in our research. The children took part in the activities with enthusiasm and engaged in lively discussions around the topics. The day finished with a talk from an inspirational female scientist, Suzi Gage. She spoke to the year 9 pupils about her own story and how she ended up becoming a scientist. Suzi also discussed some of her favourite scientists, mathematicians and engineers – Helen Sharman, Ada Lovelace, Elizabeth Blackwell, and Dorothy Hodgkin. Suzi informed students about why singing the praises of great women scientists is important as it can encourage the next generation. She then finished off by talking about why STEM subjects are great because they can help us with our curiosity about the world around us.
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Nutrition and Behaviour Unit Present Research at Bristol Half Marathon 2015 On Sunday, 13th September 2015, thousands of runners took part in Bristol's 27th annual half marathon. Dani Ferriday, Duncan McCaig, and Christina Potter from the Nutrition and Behaviour Unit (NBU) were on site in Anchor Square to speak to interested members of the public about the group's research. Using an interactive demonstration, they discussed the meaning of the term 'calorie' and illustrated how our beliefs about the amount of fullness that a food will deliver ('expected satiety') are not based solely on the number of calories that a food contains but other factors as well. For example, they showed that foods that are more familiar to us and foods that are larger are expected to deliver more fullness even when they are presented in portions with an identical number of calories. There was a lot of interest from those who participated in taking part in further NBU research.
Bristol Neuroscience Festival Award On the 13th July 2016 the Bristol Neuroscience Festival was named as the STEM Event of the Year by the coordinator for Bristol, Bath and Somerset. The Festival was up for two awards this year, the second was a University Public Engagement Award for which we were given a Highly Commended. David Turk emphasized that “public engagement events like this are only as good as the volunteers that support them, so this award is for every person that gave up their time to help put on such a brilliant couple of days. The feedback from all of the public was extremely positive and we would like to give a big thanks to all those who supported the Bristol Neuroscience festival. The festival itself took place on the 18th and 19th March and attracted more than 2700 visitors, including the Mayor of Bristol and local MPs. Visitors had the opportunity to meet with academic neuroscientists, clinical researchers and local charities, as well as join in with some hands on activities.
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Other News Suzi Gage Awarded Funding from the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute In February, Suzi Gage and Rosie Cornish from Social and Community Medicine were awarded a one year Elizabeth Blackwell Institute (EBI) grant to investigate possible associations between screen time and anxiety in teenagers. The grant is part of a scheme whereby GPs were called to identify areas where they felt research was needed. These challenges were then used to form the basis of the call for solutions, which funded this project. The project will use data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC) dataset. Given the inability to experimentally manipulate exposure to screens, a prospective cohort study such as ALSPAC is a good way investigate these associations. Given that people who use are likely to be different from people who do not in lots of ways, the richness of the auxiliary data in ALSPAC will allow this to be taken in to account.
PhD Student Emily Darley visits University of Maryland Emily visited the linguistics department at the University of Maryland just outside Washington DC in the USA, for 12 weeks starting last September. The trip was funded jointly by the ESRC (as an Overseas Institutional Visit) and by UMD’s International Graduate Research Fellowship program. Emily’s visit to Maryland was a chance to spend time in a more language-focused department, experience a little of the American “grad-school” system, and exchange research related thoughts and ideas with a new set of people asking similar questions from a different perspective. Emily also managed to engage in some non-science activities which included hiking and scrambling in the beautiful Shenandoah National Park and she made the happy discovery “that grad students in America are nearly as obsessed with board games as our own denizens of 5 Priory Road.”
‘Nudging’ Clinicians toward Better Decisions A three month Research for Health Award from the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute allowed Iain Gilchrist, Professor in Neuropsychology within the School and Director of the University’s interdisciplinary centre for research on ‘making decisions in an unstable world’, along with his team to collaborate with Chris Bourdeaux from University Hospitals Bristol. Together they studied the role of information flow in helping intensive care clinicians to make better decisions and achieve better outcomes for patients. Dr Bourdeaux said, ‘This collaboration has been very positive for us. We have worked closely together to further understand how some of our interventions are working in the ICU. Iain’s team have provided a theoretical structure to our approach which has really helped us plan further interventions.’
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MRC IEU Programme Awarded IAS Benjamin Meaker Visiting Professorship to Host Syrian Academic Marcus Munafò and Andy Skinner have been awarded an IAS Benjamin Meaker visiting Professorship in order to support the visit of smoking cessation expert Samer Rastam of the Syrian Center of Tobacco Studies in Aleppo, Syria. The purpose of these awards is to bring distinguished researchers from abroad and elsewhere in the UK to enhance the research activity of the University. Professor Rastam will join the Tobacco and Alcohol Research Group where he will work closely with Andy Skinner on the IEU’s Data Capture Theme. He will be contributing to a project which will enable the capture of standardized data about stop smoking services around the globe. Andy Skinner adds “Professor Rastam’s considerable experience working with stop smoking services in Syria, and his broad expertise in smoking services in the Middle East, will be invaluable in helping decide which types of data we should aim to collect”
In Memoriam Glyn Humphreys, 1954 – 2016 The School of Experimental Psychology were deeply saddened to hear that Professor Glyn Humphries died on the 14th January 2016 Glyn Humphreys was a Bristol graduate: he obtained both his BSc (1st class) in 1976 and PhD in Psychology in 1980. Following that, he took up a lectureship in Psychology at Birkbeck College in 1979. He went on to be the appointed Chair of Psychology at the college in 1988 before moving to the University of Birmingham in 1989. As Head of School in Birmingham, he built up one of the strongest psychology departments in the UK. In 2011, he was appointed Head of Department and Watts Professor of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford. His contribution to psychology has been wide-ranging and profound. He has worked in almost every area of psychology, with a particular impact in the study of vision and language processes. In the 1980s, Glyn applied the rigorous methods of experimental psychology to the study of patients with brain damage. This resulted in a step change in our understanding of these disorders, as well as an integration of theory between cognitive psychology and behavioral neurology. In the 1990s, he led the way in the use of computational models to explain cognition, again rewriting existing theory in the area. More recently, he had been using a range of neuroimaging methods to investigate the biological basis of cognition Underpinning this work has always been a complete mastery of the design of behavioral experiments He will be refmembered for his exquisite experimental work and his astonishing productivity, as well as for his kindness and willingness to give his time. Psychology has lost an incredible person this year.
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Produced by Megan Hurse, School of Experimental Psychology