Posts on new research by Edwin Dalmaijer’s group at the University of Bristol.
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.
A computational model of avian navigation shows the minimal requirements for inter-generational cumulative improvements to spontaneously emerge.
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.
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.
We just published an article in Current Psychology on the direct and indirect relations between socioeconomic status and various developmental factors. This post provides a brief summary.
Via Twitter, Dennis Hernaus (@hernaus_tweets) contacted me about my MPy150 library for BioPac’s MP150 system (read this older blog post for more info). After some fiddling, he managed to get his MP160 device to work in Python, and I figured it would be good to share his efforts here.
Testing children is less easy than testing adults, primarily because they lack the social inhibition to tell psychological researchers to go away with their super boring tests. This presents a problem in developmental research: How do you reach these kids?! We developed a bunch of iPad games to test the cognition of an entire classroom in one go. And it works!
In cognitive neuroscience, we’re interested in what guides human attention. We distinguish between influences from high-level cognition (e.g. current goals), and low-level visual features. There are highly sophisticated models of how visual features such as intensity, colour, and movement guide human attention. Computerised implementations of these models allow computers to mimic human eye movements. Turns out Taylor Swift’s amazing videos are an excellent example!