One of the challenges of eliciting significant action to address climate change is that it is perceived as far away and not relevant to most Minnesotans' personal experience. But when my research assistants and I tell Minnesotans about the climate change impacts on the loon population, suddenly people pay attention.

My research uses Construal Level Theory of Psychological Distance (CLT Liberman, Trope, and Stephan, 2007), a novel theoretical framework for understanding and addressing climate change as a psychologically distant event. CLT predicts that climate change, because it is spatially, temporally, and socially distant for most Americans, is mentally represented in terms of its high level, abstract features (high level construal). In contrast, psychologically proximal events (things that are spatially, temporally, and socially close) are stored in low level construal representations that emphasize concrete, sensory-based details. Sensory and experiential details, missing in the high level construal of climate change, are necessary to evoke an affective and behavioral response (Marx et al, 2007; Weber, 2006). But psychological distance is not static; it can shift depending on how an event is presented and understood. Several recent studies, including my own, explore how the psychological distance of climate change can be reduced, and whether a lower construal representation of climate change increases people's willingness to engage with the issue.

Suggested readings:

• Alexa Spence, Wouter Poortinga, and Nick Pidgeon (2012) The Psychological Distance of Climate Change, Risk Analysis, Vol. 32, No. 6 (670kb pdf)
• Christie Manning (2009) The Psychology of Sustainable Behavior, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (1.91mb pdf)

In models of decision-making, human preferences for choice options are often represented by utilities - numbers assigned to each option that express its desirability. Due to a dearth of useful alternatives, utility models remain in widespread use despite considerable empirical evidence revealing their deficiencies. In particular, preferences are contingent on context and can even exhibit reversals between contexts. We have developed a new theory of preference formation based on rational optimal learning of values. Our critical assumptions are that feedback about an option's worth is relative to the comparison items, and that the information we receive about the quality of options is limited. Preferences are equivalent to a probabilistic guess about which option is the best of the set. Surprisingly, we show that this representation is equivalent to utility under conditions where quality feedback is consistent, but given inconsistent quality feedback, it provides explanations of many previously intractable violations of rational choice behavior. In short, people may not be consistent, optimal decision makers relative to an agent that knows the value of everything in the world. But they might be optimal learners of value in a world where value information is often inconsistent and coarse-grained.

Suggested reading:

• Nisheeth Srivastava, Paul Schrater (2012) Rational inference of relative preferences, Poster abstract, Neural Information Processing Systems Foundation conference

Money plays a significant role in people's lives and yet only recently has experimental attention been given to the psychological underpinnings of money. We systematically varied what degree the concept of money was activated in participants' minds. We found that reminders of money made people work harder than they would otherwise toward personal goals. New work found that people reminded of money are quite sensitive to the presence of goals, and will exert more effort to achieve goal-framed activities (but not non-goal framed activities). This effect goes beyond competency goals and even extends to the goal to have fun. Conversely, mere reminders of money render people interpersonally insensitive to others. For instance, people reminded of money were less helpful than others and feel no different whether socially included or excluded. New work shows that people reminded of money endorse a free market ideology more than they would otherwise. Consequently, they adopt a viewpoint of financial and economics inequalities akin to social darwinism in that inequities reflect justifiable differences in people's abilities or efforts. In short, activating the mere concept of money has robust, and mostly negative, effects on interpersonal behaviors. But it exerts a strong, mostly positive, effect on personal motivation.

Suggested reading:

• Yang Q, et al. Diverging Effects of Clean Versus Dirty Money on Attitudes, Values, and Interpersonal Behavior (355kb doc)
• Vohs K, et al. The Psychological Consequences of Money (155kb pdf)

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The structure, function, and chemistry of the brain can be assessed noninvasively by existing technologies. In addition, several types of examination can be used to assess 'whole brain' output such as neurological exams, neuropsychological exams, cognitive assessments, structured interviews and questionnaires. The Women's Healthy Brain Aging Study's long-term goal is to create a comprehensive and systematic database of key brain, cognitive, language and genomic measurements during the lifespan to characterize brain status, assess its change over time, and associate it with genomic makeup, cognitive function, and language abilities.

Presently, information from brain assessments is available in digital form and can be processed rapidly by computers. However, a comprehensive evaluation of the brain is not possible, mainly due to the lack of rigorous, effective, and efficient ways to combine diverse information from these assessments and distill it to simple and meaningful measures of brain status. A major challenge is how to make sense of all this information while dealing with vast datasets, their association and integration. This research focuses on exactly this informatics issue, namely the design, operation and interaction among large, diverse datasets to discover key relations and apply them towards a unified assessment of brain status.

Suggested reading:

• The Minnesota Women Healthy Aging Project by Apostolos P. Georgopoulos, M.D., Ph.D. (186kb pdf)

Visual attention functions to select relevant information for further processing among vast amounts of visual input, and attention is generally important for resolving competition between neural representations. I will first describe a set of EEG experiments investigating the role of attention in resolving interocular competition. Using an EEG frequency tagging method to track cortical representations of the conflicting images presented separately to the two eyes, we show that when attention was diverted away interocular competition remain unresolved. I will also describe a series of behavioral experiments showing that voluntary attention can be eye-specific, modulating visual processing within a specific monocular channel, despite that fact that observers normally do not have explicit access to the eye-of-origin information.

Publications related to this talk:

• Zhang P, Jiang Y, He S. (2012) Voluntary attention modulates processing of eye-specific visual information. Psychol Sci. 23(3):254-60.
• Zhang P, Jamison K, Engel S, He B, He S. (2011). Binocular rivalry requires visual attention. Neuron, 71, 362-369.

2:20-2:30 Discussion

3:20-3:30 Discussion

3:30-3:45 Break

3:45-4:00 American Legion Family Brain Sciences Award

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In this talk, I will share some of my recent experiences with applying Bayesian models and methods to the analysis of data from psychophysical or neurophysiological studies. After reviewing some of the main differences between the "frequentist" and Bayesian approaches, and providing some motivation for the latter, I will illustrate (using concrete examples) some applications of Bayesian models and modern Bayesian computational methods (Markov-chain Monte Carlo) in the analysis of psychophysical data and neural responses. While most of the examples used in the talk will be drawn from studies of auditory perception or auditory neuroscience, the models that I will discuss (e.g., Bayesian hierarchical models, Gaussian processes) have potentially useful applications in visual psychophysics and other areas of experimental/cognitive psychology. Lastly, I will point out some of the most challenging difficulties that I face(d) on this transformative journey from frequentist to Bayesian thinking.

Suggested reading:

• John K. Kruschke, What to believe: Bayesian methods for data analysis. Trends in Cognitive Sciences Vol.14 No.7
• Ruud Wetzels, et al. (2011) Statistical Evidence in Experimental Psychology: An Empirical Comparison Using 855 t Tests. Perspectives on Psychological Science 6(3) 291–298
• David J.C. Mackay, (1998) Introduction to gaussian processes. Version 2.2

Anomalous processing of visual stimuli is one of several promising markers of genetic liability for schizophrenia. Researchers have recently suggested that a deficit in visual integration may result in poor perceptual closure and problems with object recognition noted in the disorder. Similar abnormalities have been documented in biological relatives of schizophrenia patients, particularly when object perception is made difficult through brief presentation of stimuli or addition of visual noise. Nevertheless, investigators have yet to clearly identify specific abnormalities in brain function that underlie object perception deficits that are associated with genetic variants predisposing the disorder. To date, evidence suggests that abnormalities in both early and late visual perceptual processes may be an expression of genetic liability for schizophrenia, with some indication of biased early top-down factors influencing errors in perception which may give rise to hallucinatory phenomena.

• Fragile Early Visual Percepts Mark Genetic Liability Specific to Schizophrenia. Sponheim SR, Sass SM, Noukki AL, Hegeman BM. Schizophr Bull. 2012 Mar 23. [Epub ahead of print] PMID: 22446567