Research & Expertise – News

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.

New theoretical paper by Igor Utochkin on ensembles is now published in Journal of Vision. He tried to explain how our visual system uses summary statistics to transform the continuous variation of visible features into discrete categories. This aids our ability to see multiple items as representing same or different types of objects (say, leaves on a tree or apples among these leaves) at a moment.

There are numerous ways of impacting people’s decisions, you can convince, intimidate, hypnotise, or use particular tools on certain parts of the brain. Why do scientists do this and what do these experiments show? Vasily Klucharev, Head of HSE’s School of Psychology answers questions posed by Olga Orlova, who hosts the  Hamburg Score  programme on Russia’s Public Television Channel.

Professor from Stanford University Samuel McClure gave a talk on «Cognitive and Neural Processes in Delay Discounting».

Some university teachers, but not all, are involved in their school's affairs and tend to take its failures personally and celebrate its successes as their own. Some teachers are willing to work weekends, help their colleagues and engage in various extracurricular activities, while others stick firmly to their job descriptions and rarely agree to do anything not expressly stated in their contract. According to Andrey Lovakov, what makes a difference between the former and the latter is the level of commitment to their institution determined by a number of factors.

New research by Evgeny Osin and his collaborators shows that our personal perspective on time can determine how we cooperate.

Melanie Sheldon, an instructor at the University of Missouri – Columbia, recently offered a lecture course at the HSE Winter School 2015 on the psychology of motivation, which was organized by the International Laboratory of Positive Psychology of Personality and Motivation, headed by Dmitry Leontiev. She also offered an open lecture on 'Sex and Evolutionary Psychology' at HSE. Melanie recently spoke with the HSE news service about her experience taking part in the HSE Winter School.

This talk was given at a local TEDx event, produced independently of the TED Conferences. Head of HSE School of Psychology Vasily Klucharev showed what occurs in the human brain when a person’s opinion conflicts with the majority’s opinion. What happens in the brains of nonconformists? What causes the «herd mentality»?