Seminars 2017-2018

Music as Medicine: Can singing together prevent cognitive decline in aging?

Dr. Feng Lei is a Research Assistant Professor at the Department of Psychological Medicine, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, NUS. He received his medical and psychiatric trainings in Shandong, China and obtained his PhD from NUS in 2009. His primary research interest is the epidemiology and prevention of cognitive decline and dementia. He has over 100 research publications on aging, cognition, and mental health. He has successfully obtained research grants amounting to over three million Singapore dollars as the Principal Investigator. His recent awards include the NUHS Academic Medicine Development Award (2013), NUHS Clinician Scientist Program Award (2014) and the MOH Transition Award (2016).

Meaning survives visual crowding, but not semantic integration over time

Professor Su-Ling Yeh is a distinguished professor in the Department of Psychology, National Taiwan University. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley, and has been teaching at NTU afterwards. She was the recipient of academic awards of Ministry of Education and Ministry of Science and Technology. Her research interests include vision, attention, consciousness, multisensory perception, emotion, word recognition, aging, blue light effect, statistical regularity, and applied research on image processing and display technology.
To understand the conscious and unconscious processes, Professor Yeh’s lab has used different techniques to block participants’ consciousness while keeping unconscious processing intact. These techniques include crowding, masking, inattentional blindness, repetition blindness, motion induced blindness, and continuous flash suppression, with behavioral and brain-imaging techniques such as EEG, ERP, MEG, and fMRI. Her lab is also interested in the relationship between emotion, perception, attention, working memory, and consciousness.
Professor Yeh has extensive experience in leading research teams and initiating international collaborative projects. Interdisciplinary collaborations include applied research on perceptual video and image processing, portable eye-tracker and gaze contingent display, affective computing, blue-light effect, and assistive robots for elderly people.

Semantic Retrieval and Integration during Sentence Reading: Evidence from Temporal and Spatial Dynamics

Suiping Wang, PhD, is a cognitive psychologist who has extensive experience on study both the temporal and spatial dimensions of language comprehension using multimodal behavior and imaging techniques, such as eye movement, ERPs, and fMRI. She earned her PhD in Psychology at South China Normal University in 2000. Her PhD thesis was awarded “National Top 100 Doctoral Dissertation” by Ministry of Education, P. R. China in 2002. For more than 15 years, she has been studying how the different aspects of language (lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic) contribute to the mental representation of sentence and discourse processing in the brain. She is also interested in the relationship between the cognitive mechanisms of language processing and those of other kinds information processing. She is the Principal Investigator on several projects that use multimodal imaging techniques to study both the temporal and spatial dimensions of cognition in the brain. More recently, she has been working on language project with special populations, including Autism Spectrum Disorder and individuals with cochlear implant. She has published in a wide range of international peer-reviewed journals, such as Cerebral Cortex, Neuroimage, Neuropsychologia, Language and Cognitive Processes, Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, et al. She is now a Full Professor in the School of Psychology at South China Normal University, and Pearl River Distinguished Professor of Guangdong Province in China from 2011.

Understanding individual differences in psychiatry – genetics versus environmental influences

Dr Cathy Fernandes originally trained as a psychopharmacologist at King’s College London working in the research field of anxiety and drug dependence. She currently heads the ‘Preclinical Models of Neurodevelopmental Disorders’ group at the SGDP Centre (Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, King’s College London) investigating the contribution of genetic and environmental mechanisms to a range of neurodevelopmental psychiatric disorders. In addition to studying the role of genes in behaviour, she also has a particular interest in the interaction of genes with early life stressful environments and drug exposure.
Dr. Fernandes has more than 20 years of learning and teaching experience at King’s College London, first as a student and then as a teacher. My teaching ranges from undergraduate to postgraduate to specialist courses.

The Social Construction of Adolescence: Insights from the United States and China

Eva Pomerantz received her PhD from the Department of Psychology at New York University. Since then, she has been a faculty member at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Pomerantz’s research focuses on how to motivate youth in school to facilitate their learning, particularly as youth navigate adolescence. Although Dr. Pomerantz has spent much of her career studying this issue in the United States, she has also studied it in China where youth’s achievement is higher than that of their American counterparts. Dr. Pomerantz has published over 75 papers in scholarly journals and edited volumes. Her research has been featured in multiple media outlets as well. Dr. Pomerantz has been an Editorial Consultant for the journals Child Development and Developmental Psychology. She also served as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. She has also been a member of American grant reviewing panels (for example, at the National Science Foundation).

Future Orientation: Temporal Correlates, Genetic Mechanisms, and their Implications for Health Behaviors and Depression

Yiqun Gan is a professor at School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, China. She has received her Ph.D. in the Chinese University of Hong Kong in 1998. She has published over 90 research papers as the first or corresponding author, and her findings were published in the top international journals such as Journal of Personality and Health Psychology. She has been the PI of a number of research projects funded by the National Science Foundation of China. She was invited to a present as a Transversal Keynote Speaker at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in 2014, and to convene an Invited Symposium at the International Congress of Psychology in 2012 and at the International Congress of Applied Psychology in 2018. She currently serves as an Associate Editor for Journal of Pacific Rim Psychology and as an editorial board member for Applied Psychology: Health and Well-being and Stress and Health. Her research on future orientation and resilience has embraced numerous state-of-the-art techniques such as laboratory experiments, molecular genetics, physiological indexes, eye tracking, and ERP, which has placed her work on the cutting edge of the science. She has won the title of “Recognized Psychologist” by the Chinese Psychological Society in 2016, and was nominated as a fellow of the International Association of Applied Psychology in 2017.

Applied Decision (Neuro)science: Culture, Beauty and Architecture

George Christopoulos is a Decision Neuroscientist (University of Cambridge; postdoc at Cambridge, Baylor College of Medicine and Virginia Tech) with extensive research experience in neurobehavioral accounts of human behavior. He is Assistant Professor at Nanyang Business School, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and Research Director of the Culture Science Institute.
A series of studies identified the neural correlates underlying risk attitudes (PNAS, 2009; Journal of Neuroscience, 2009, 2010), while more recent studies employed neuro-computational approaches to understand the neurobehavioral and cultural accounts of aspects of social decision making - such as cooperation, competition, beauty / aesthetics and social influence (Nature Neuroscience, 2015, Neuroimage 2015). A new research stream explores the effects of the development of Mega-Cities and urbanicity on human behaviour, mental health and performance.
Methodologically, he adopts a rich, multi-disciplinary approach combining different methods including (i) lab-based methods (behavioral game theory) (ii) cognitive neuroscience (fMRI, eye-tracking and electrodermal responses) (iii) computational approaches (iv) field studies with real-world applications while exploring new methods (wearable devices and virtual reality).
His lab has received well over $1.1M in external funding from both government and industry. This research has been showcased in various media, including the French TV and Channel News Asia; finally, he has been consulting major companies in Singapore and overseas.

The Effects of Prior Familiarity on Working Memory Representations and Processes

Dr. Zhang received his Ph.D. in Experimental Psychology from the University of Iowa. He joined faculty at the Department of Psychology at University of California, Riverside in 2012. The research program in Dr. Zhang’s laboratory focuses on perception, memory, and higher cognition using multiple Cognitive Neuroscience methods, including eye tracking, EEG, non-invasive brain stimulation, and fMRI.

Causes, Consequences, and Neural Correlates of Visual Awareness

Dr. Po-Jang (Brown) Hsieh received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Neuroscience from Dartmouth College, USA in 2008, and was a research scientist at MIT until 2011. He is now an assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School in Singapore. He is interested in understanding how the human brain is able to perceive and experience the world. He studies the human neural bases of perception, attention, and consciousness with EEG, functional brain imaging (fMRI), neural decoding methods, and psychophysical techniques.

Eye Movements in Reading:Perceptual Span and Parafoveal Processing

Dr. Yan received his Ph.D from the Beijing Normal University in 2008. He then works as a research scientist at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research area is eye-movement control during reading, focusing on how reading varies across different writing systems (Simplified and Traditional Chinese, German, English, Uyghur, Finnish, Korean etc.) and across different individuals (normal adults, typically developing readers, second-language learners of Chinese, deaf readers and dyslexic readers). His main research topics include (a) the influence of high-level linguistic factors on saccade generation, (b) lexical processing from foveal and parafoveal words, (c) perceptual span in reading and (d) reading behaviors of unskilled readers and impaired readers.

New Methodologies for Assessing Emotional Intelligence using Technologies

PhD. in work psychology and associate professor at Universitat Jaume I de Castellon. He is director of the “Emotionally Intelligent Organization” Research team and lecturer in subjects related to Emotions recognition, Emotional Intelligence and Communication. His areas of interests are mainly related to the assessment of Emotional Intelligence.

On the other hand, he is also consultant in organizations for selection and assessment processes. He has participated in 13 research projects and currently is the head (principal researcher) of two projects about Emotional Intelligence and Well-being. He collaborated for a year in the “Health, Emotion and Behavior Laboratory” in Yale University (USA) by the supervision of Peter Salovey and Mark Brackett where he developed and applied programs for enhancing emotional competences among employees and leaders. Additionally, is the CEO of Emotional Apps (www.emotional-apps.com) a company that applies technology to transform the existing scientific knowledge into applications by providing solutions for companies and universities.

In the last years, professor Bresó has published articles and papers in conferences regarding to Emotional perception and he is the author of the Mobile Emotional Intelligence Test (MEITPRO) that is a web application for assessing Emotional Intelligence using Computers, Smartphones and Tablets.