People generally avoid disgusting things, but what if you’re deciding whether to eat them? At an experimental buffet, people spent more time looking at edible insects and other unusual snacks. However, they only rated the insects as more disgusting. This suggests that novelty drives looking behaviour when we’re foraging, and can even overrule the tendency to look away from disgust elicitors.
Sameer won a prize for his talk at the University of Bristol Scholarship Celebration!
Evgeniya Anisimova gave a talk at the South-West Undergraduate Conference 2025. She spoke on how orthorexia impacts the stomach’s response to foods from different categories.
TL;DR A recent Editorial in the journal Brain has riled up academics. In the article, Prof Masud Husain argues against “bullshit jobs” in academia. Online, people seem to either recognise the content or to take offense to its tone and timing. Because the piece really resonated with me, I aim…
A computational model of avian navigation shows the minimal requirements for inter-generational cumulative improvements to spontaneously emerge.
Many people confuse the terms for sex (“male”, “female”, “intersex”, etc.) and the terms for gender (“man”, “woman”, “non-binary”, etc.), even though sex and gender are different constructs. This sounds like a pedantic point, but it leads to imprecise writing and theorising: Is the nature of your proposed mechanism biological, social, or both?
No.
Tom Hawkins gave a talk at the 1st Dutch Pupillometry Symposium. He presented a computational model of pseudo-neglect as an attentional gradient over the horizontal plane that fades out over time. It managed to capture individual differences in spatial bias, and when and how fast participants’ alertness faded during a task.
This is a quick guide for students who are unsure about how to email at uni. (Or you might have been sent this guide by your prof, in which case this guide is definitely for you too!) Because email isn’t quite like writing a letter, but also not quite like texting, there is considerable confusion about etiquette. Also, many academics have unspoken expectations! The tips in this guide should help you get as quick and as helpful a reply as possible.
Recently, Edwin spoke at the Bristol Neuroscience Showcase. The talk focussed on disgust: how it works, how it doesn’t habituate, and how it can be (somewhat) overcome by using drugs that normalise the rhythm of the stomach. It can now be viewed online.