Events
How is AI impacting people
Abstract: AI systems are now used by a billion people worldwide. What is their impact on human users? Popular narratives of concern argue that AI may be undermining our cognitive abilities, polluting our information ecosystem, corroding human relationships, damaging our mental health, and rendering us vulnerable to persuasion, manipulation, emotional dependence, and social engineering. Does the empirical evidence support these claims? Emerging research has begun to study the impact that AI has on people, via model evaluations, user studies, analysis of consumer chatlogs, and agent-based simulations. Here, we review this research, to summarise what we know about how AI is impacting people.
Monday, 12 October 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Christopher Summerfield (Experimental Psychology) https://www.medsci.ox.ac.uk/study/graduateschool/supervisors/christopher-summerfield
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building - Lecture Theatre 2
Lecture Theatre 2 The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford United Kingdom
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Asifa Majid
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Speaking, Listening, Stuttering: Probing the brain’s speech system
Abstract to follow
Monday, 19 October 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Kate Watkins (University of Oxford) https://www.psy.ox.ac.uk/people/kate-watkins
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Asifa Majid
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Astor Lecture - Supporting the anxious child: Helpful strategies for clinicians and parents
Anxiety and its disorders are the most prevalent childhood mental health condition, affecting 12.3% of children in the US, with similar rates in the UK, and up to 932 million children globally. Associated with tremendous suffering and impairment, these are chronic conditions, which if left untreated, lead to other mental health problems along with suicidality. Anxiety and its disorders contribute as well to overwhelming day-to-day distress/burden among parents, including financial burden. A significant contributor to parent distress/burden is the lack of strong theory and research about how clinicians might guide parents to better support their anxious child. This presentation will cover theoretical and empirical foundations for involving parents in the treatment of their anxious child, highlighting particularly what our research has shown with regard to helpful (and unhelpful) parent behaviors. My presentation concludes with a discussion of evidence-based clinical strategies that can optimize the role of parents and an overview of current new research.
Monday, 26 October 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Wendy K Silverman (Yale University) https://medicine.yale.edu/myysm/profile/wendy-silverman/
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Eleanor Leigh
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Perspectives in Psychology Seminar
Abstract to follow
Monday, 2 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Matthias Gruber (Cardiff University) https://profiles.cardiff.ac.uk/staff/gruberm
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Disa Sauter
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Learning to automate behaviour: How the basal ganglia break free from value-based control
Abstract Everyday tasks require the brain to simultaneously coordinate deliberative and automatic control processes. In this seminar, recent data will be presented showing that these two types of behavioural strategy are updated by distinct types of dopaminergic teaching signals. Reward prediction errors are used to reinforce flexible, value-based associations. Conversely, movement-based action prediction errors reinforce stable, value-free stimulus-action associations. While reward prediction errors are critical for initial flexible learning, action prediction errors are needed to automate repetitive associations based on how often the association occurs. We will also present new data showing how, during sleep, procedural replay in the dorsal striatum is critical for the consolidation of automatic motor skills. Importantly, all features of this striatal replay are demonstrated to be functionally independent of the hippocampus. Together, this work suggests the existence of computationally distinct teaching signals and dedicated offline replay systems for learning automatic and flexible behavioural strategies.
Tuesday, 3 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Dr Marcus Stephenson-Jones (The Sainsbury Wellcome Centre, UK) https://www.sainsburywellcome.org/people/marcus-stephenson-jones
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building - Seminar room 7 & 8
Seminar room 7 & 8 The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford United Kingdom
Venue details: Seminar Room 7/8 (Lower ground floor), South Parks Road Oxford, OX1 3EL
Organiser: Dr Ali Mahmoodi, Dr Fei-Yang Huang
Host: Prof Mark Walton
Series: Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (BEACON) Seminar Series
Format: In Person
Understanding Stories: Coordinating Semantic and Default Mode Networks During Narrative Comprehension
The past thirty years of cognitive neuroscience research has revealed a lot about the brain networks involved in language and semantic processing. But almost all of this research is based on studies of single words, sentences, or short passages, all presented outside of any meaningful context. When we tried to replicate these results with longer-form narrative stimuli (audiobooks, movies), we found some surprising results that forced us to refocus our attention from comprehension of isolated words and sentences to how that comprehension interacts with situation models – representations of the state of affairs in a story. I will summarise some of those initial surprising findings, how we have approached studying language comprehension in the context of situation models, and what we have learned about how the semantic and default mode networks coordinate during narrative comprehension.
Monday, 9 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Daniel Mirman (The University of Edinburgh) https://edwebprofiles.ed.ac.uk/profile/dr-daniel-mirman
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Kate Nation
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Confessions of an Imposter
Writing abstracts makes me nervous. What will happen if I over-promise? People will be disappointed by the talk, and they won’t just shrug and think I’m having a bad day. They’ll see right through me. Who is this woman who dares to call herself a Professor? I’ll talk about feelings of this kind among women in psychological science - and others whose faces don’t quite fit. I’ll ask whether it helps or exacerbates the problem to label them ‘Imposter Syndrome’. The term risks individualising what are often structural obstacles, and medicalising forms of doubt that may be entirely rational. Yet I have also found the concept clarifying and, at times, steadying. I’ll consider how the causes and consequences of these feelings can be understood and tamed, and I’ll argue that researchers who feel out of place are well-placed to question received wisdom. Being an outsider can be a source of intellectual strength.
Monday, 16 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Cecilia Heyes (University of Oxford) https://users.ox.ac.uk/~ascch/
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Asifa Majid
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Perspectives in Psychology Seminar
Abstract to follow
Monday, 23 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Anna Franklin (University of Sussex) https://profiles.sussex.ac.uk/p256540-anna-franklin
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Asifa Majid
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person
Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (BEACON) Seminar
Abstract TBC
Wednesday, 25 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s): Professor Aidan J Horner (University of York) https://www.york.ac.uk/psychology/people/academicstaff/ah1643/#profile-content
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building - Seminar room 6
Seminar room 6 The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford United Kingdom
Venue details: Seminar Room 6 (Lower ground floor), South Parks Road Oxford, OX1 3EL
Organiser: Dr Ali Mahmoodi, Dr Fei-Yang Huang
Host: Prof Jill O’Reilly
Series: Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience (BEACON) Seminar Series
Format: In Person
ECR Spotlight Talks
Abstracts to follow
Monday, 30 November 2026, 1pm to 2pm
Speaker(s):
Dr Jessica Thompson
(University of Oxford)
Dr Ellie Spens
(University of Oxford)
Venue:
The Life and Mind Building
The Life and Mind Building South Parks Road Oxford Oxfordshire OX1 3RB United Kingdom
Venue details: Lecture Room 2, Life and Mind Building, Lower Ground Floor
Organiser: Professor Asifa Majid
Host: Tsvetomira Dumbalska
Series: Perspectives in Psychology
Format: In Person