News

The Higher School of Economics is very serious about students getting involved in undergraduate research. For Russian Science Day, celebrated on February 8, the HSE News Service spoke with three young HSE researchers about their work and learned how the students set goals for themselves, achieve results, and move forward with what some might deem frighteningly ambitious research ideas. One of them was Elizaveta Okorokova, second-year student in the ‘Cognitive Sciences and Technologies: From Neuron to Cognition’ master’s programme.

Tadamasa Sawada is a specialist in the psychology of visual perception at HSE. He has recently talked to the online magazine The Village about everyday Moscow, cultural differences, and doing research in Russia.

On 24 November John Berry (Chief Researcher Fellow of our laboratory, Professor of Queens University, Canada) took part in the «Culture matters» research seminar with the report on "Patterns and determinants of immigrants' sense of belonging to Canada and their source country, and relationships with their well-being".

The HSE Centre for Cognition and Decision Making together with a group of other Russian research centres is about to begin work on creating a mathematical model of the human brain. With its help scientists will be able to study the processes which take place in the brain and brain disease. It could be used for medical purposes in the future.   

On 17th October the HSE School of Psychology is holding Welcome Lab Day as a continuation of the Nauka O+ festival. Head of School Vasily Klucharev talks to us about what will be on display, which areas of psychology are most popular today and whether it is possible to use brain stimulation to make people conform.

The lower a person's resilience, the greater their alienation from themself, other people, and society. In turn, self-alienation and a lack of personal relationships can cause one to approve of military action as a solution to international conflicts, according to Olga Gulevich, Associate Professor of the HSE School of Psychology, and Andrey Nevruyev, postgraduate student of the same department.

On October 5th, 2015 Yulia Kovas will give an open lecture at the HSE Centre for Cognition & Decision Making — 'An Introduction to Behavioral Genetics'. Professor of Genetics and Psychology at Goldsmiths College, London University and Co-director of the Russian British Laboratory of Psychogenetics and author of many academic articles, Yulia Kovas will talk about the problems facing contemporary behavioral genetics, how DNA influences the individual variations of a person’s psychological features, what role the interaction between genes and the environment plays in the formation of behaviour and other questions of contemporary behavioral genetics.

Can the brain be linked directly to the computer? What areas of the brain are involved in speech recognition? What impacts on decision-making and how to other people influence this process? Can you calculate people's inclination to take risks? Participants in the 'Cognitive Control, Communication and Perception: Psychological and Neurobiological Aspects' conference, which took place September 29-30, 2015 at the  Centre for Cognition & Decision Making  at HSE.

The First International Summer Workshop on Alternative Methods in Social Research, which took place from July 13^th to 19^th 2015, in Barcelona, was dedicated to hybrid methods of evaluation in the arts and life sciences. Anna Paukova, lecturer at the HSE School of Psychology (Department of Psychology of Personality) participated in the event.

HSE’s social and cognitive psychologists will help the British Higher School of Art and Design (BHSAD) in their project ‘Design Against Crime’.