School of Psychology 2019 research seminars

The following school-wide research seminars are taking place throughout semester 1, 2019.

Please save these dates and see details in flyer below

Where:  Psychology Building, Keats Room AVLG-17 and Zoom link to Ourimbah EXSA-102

When: 12:00pm - 1:00pm

·       Week 2 - 6^th March

·       Week 4 - 20^th March

·       Week 6 - 3^rd April

·       Week 8 - 1^st May

·       Week 10 - 15^th May

·       Week 12 - 29^th May

UoN students and staff present at the Australian Math Psyc

Last week, students and staff from the School of Psychology at the University of Newcastle traveled to Melbourne for the annual meeting of the Australasian Society for Mathematical Psychology. among the topics presented were  Models of Memory, Consumer Choices, Methods for Estimating Cognitive Workload, and  more.

Next year's meeting is planned to take place in Sydney. Newcastle will host the 2021 meeting of the society, and it'd be great to have locals and guests alike, so mark Feb 2021 in your calendars.

Laura Waters presenting her work on developing a 3D environment for visual search experiments (more photos available on Leslie Blaha Twitter feed, @leslieblaha)

'work hard, play hard': AMPC attendees at the end of the traditional soccer game.

JUST PUBLISHED: new article on the relationship between between early life events and decision urgency

A new paper based on the PhD research of UoN graduate student Johanne Knowles examined the relationship between decision urgency and early life adversity. The article, co-authored with Nathan Evans and Darren Burke, can be accessed here:
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00243/full

The relationship between early life adversity and adult outcomes is traditionally investigated relative to risk and protective factors (e.g., resilience, cognitive appraisal), and poor self-control or decision-making. However, life history theory suggests this relationship may be adaptive—underpinned by mechanisms that use early environmental cues to alter the developmental trajectory toward more short-term strategies. These short-term strategies have some theoretical overlap with the most common process models of decision-making—evidence accumulation models—which model decision urgency as a decision threshold. In the current paper, the authors examined the relationship between decision urgency (through the linear ballistic accumulator) and early life adversity. A mixture of analysis methods, including a joint model analysis designed to explicitly account for uncertainty in estimated decision urgency values, revealed weak-to-strong evidence in favor of a relationship between decision urgency and early life adversity, suggesting a possible effect of life history strategy on even the most basic decisions.   

Psychology and Computer Games

So, Psychologists study computer games as well !

This year, Macquarie University hosted Interactive Entertainment 2019, a satellite conference of the Australasian Computer Science Week. This conference brought together researchers and developers of games and digital entertainment from around Australia. Alex Thorpe, a PhD student from the Schools of Psychology and Engineering at UoN, presented research on the cognitive workload imposition of user interfaces, and the measurement of this imposition. This research focused on the detection response task (DRT) as an online, objective measure of workload in a continuous computer-based task. Alex and his co-authors were fortunate enough to be awarded Best Student Paper for their research.

link to the paper:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/330371784_Assessing_Game_Interface_Workload_and_Usability_A_Cognitive_Science_Perspective