Last week I was in Paris attending the 2019 International Convention of Psychological Science in Paris, for which I had organised the symposium ‘Risk Taking Across the Life Span: Integrating Biological, Cognitive and Social Perspectives’. The overarching aim of the symposium was to bring together researchers from different disciplines in order to exchange ideas and find a common road map for the study of individual differences in risk taking. Alongside talks from Iroise Dumontheil (Birkbeck, University of London) and Richard Karlsson Linnér (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), I presented some work we conducted at CDS. As you can gauge from our title slides, the three of us share an interest in biological and developmental aspects of risk taking.

I also attended other symposia on risk taking, but found the lack of awareness of measurement issues disappointing. It seems that as a discipline, we have not made much progress in bridging the gap between lab measures and real-world outcomes, not just within the context of risk-taking research but within the context of psychological research in general. This needs to change.

Apart from our own symposium, the conference featured several keynote addresses, and I was excited to learn one of them was to be given by BJ Casey. BJ Casey is an eminent Professor of Psychology at Yale University, who has spent most of her academic career researching adolescent development by focusing on the adolescent brain. I found it interesting that the title of her talk promised to illuminate adolescence both from the perspective of a period of adaptive and arrested development, yet most of the work she presented adopted primarily one measure and focused predominantly on the maladaptive rather than the adaptive aspect of adolescent decision making. Still, some impressive work across several years involving many collaborations and many more doctoral students.

We are delighted to announce the first Women in Data Science (WiDS) Basel conference taking place:

Monday, 4 March 2019 (16:00 – 20:00) at the Department of Psychology, Missionsstrasse 64A, 4055 Basel.

WiDS Basel is part of the WiDS initiative that aims to foster gender diversity in the data sciences. WiDS Basel features talks from female speakers in academia and industry who are doing outstanding work at the intersection of data science and Psychology or Economics. The conference aims to inspire and educate people who are curious about or are working in the behavioral sciences using tools from data science. WiDS Basel features talks about career issues, tips and tools for data science, as well as mentoring and networking opportunities. You can find the full program here.

The conference is hosted for the first time in Basel as a joint initiative of members of the Department of Psychology, the Faculty of Business and Economics, and the Bernoulli Network for the Behavioral Sciences of the University of Basel.

Attendance is free but there are limited number of spots with registration on a first-come first-served basis (registration closes 28 February, or earlier if spaces are filled). In order to become a participant of WiDS Basel, please register now on the website.

WiDS Basel Team (Aya Kachi, Jana Jarecki, Rui Mata)

Today, I’m attending a conference on “fake facts” taking place at Uni Basel that joins people from journalism/media, industry, and academia to discuss issues related to this oxymoron. From the organisers:

«Fake Facts»: ein Oxymoron, das immer mehr zur bedauernswerten Wirklichkeit wird und die Wissenschaft zunehmend zu untergraben droht. Die Konferenz «F3–Fighting Fake Facts» ist ein Beitrag, um die wissenschaftliche Gemeinschaft und die Öffentlichkeit für das Problem zu sensibilisieren. Fundierte Fakten und bewiesene Wahrheiten sind das Fundament wissenschaftlichen Fortschritts und die Grundlagen für einen offenen und konstruktiven Dialog.

Website: https://sciforum.net/conference/FightingFakeFacts

The conference raises more questions than it provides answers to fighting “fake facts” but it’s nice to see media and academia coming together to discuss the topic…

The 2018 meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics was hosted over three days in early October by the Wharton School at the University of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. As a warm-up to the main event, the Consumer Neuroscience Satellite Symposium is another increasingly popular platform for scientific communication and exchange the day before the start of the main conference. A few of us – Sebastian Gluth, Regina Weilbächer, Peter Krämer, Laura Fontanesi, Loreen Tisdall – made the trip to the US East Coast to attend the symposium and/or conference, and present some of the projects we are working on (see conference contributions below).

As in previous years, the conference featured topical sessions (e.g., ‘Intertemporal Decision Making and Self-Control’, ‘Valuation and Choice’), poster sessions, poster spotlights, workshops, the Fred Kavli Plenary Lecture (Alex Kacelnik, ‘Choice and value: The biology of decision making’), and of course plenty of opportunity to network. Interestingly, several workshops focused on big data and online testing: Robb Rutledge for example presented the Great Brain Experiment, an app that gamifies experiments on risk, memory, attention, and impulsivity and is allowing researcher to collect large datasets (n > 10,000).

Regrettably, very few talks focused on methodological issues in neuroeconomics. An exception was the best voted talk: “The space of decision models
” by Sudeep Bhatia. In this talk, Bathia presented a method to look at commonalities between the many proposed decision making models (he considered 157 of them), based on their explanatory power and complexity.

A very welcome break away from previous meetings was that quite a few talks were given by early career researchers. Anecdotally, we noticed a worrying trend, namely, that NeuroEconomists do not like apples: A number of talks focused on decisions that involved healthy but bad-tasting apples, versus unhealthy but yummy doughnuts. More data is needed to draw firm conclusions on the link between research topic and taste perception.

This year’s Cocktail Reception was hosted at the Penn Museum’s Egypt Gallery, where presumably the less formal atmosphere led to a wide range of discussions, including the (ethical) use of animals in research, the neural mechanisms underlying prosopagnosia, and individuals’ preferences for burial over cremation … something for everyone. The subsequent journey to the south side of town for famous Philly cheese steak, in contrast, was not for everyone, but an experience nevertheless. 

Next year’s meeting will be in Dublin, Ireland, and we look forward to learning more about ongoing research in NeuroEconomics. As a direct outcome of the meeting, Laura and Loreen will join the ‘Neuroimaging Analysis Replication and Prediction Study’ … stay tuned for further details. 

—- Blog post co-authored by Laura Fontanesi and Loreen Tisdall —-

Fontanesi, L., Gluth, S., Rieskamp, J., & Forstmann, B. (2018). The role of dopaminergic midbrain nuclei in predicting monetary gains and losses: Who’s doing what? Paper presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Gluth, S., & Meiran, N. (2018). Linking trial-by-trial variability in computational models to neural data via Leave-One-Trial-Out (LOTO). Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Kraemer, P., Fontanesi, L., Spektor, M., & Gluth, S. (2018). How response time analysis aides model selection in memory-based decisions. Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Tisdall, L., Frey, R., Horn, A., Ostwald, D., Horvath, L., Pedroni, A., Blankenburg, F., Rieskamp, J., Hertwig, R., & Mata, R. (2018). The risky brain: Local morphometry and degree centrality as neural markers of psychometrically-derived risk preference factors. Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Weilbaecher, R., Rieskamp, J., Krajbich, I., & Gluth, S. (2018). Is attention mediating the memory bias in preferential choice? Poster presented at the 16th annual meeting of the Society for NeuroEconomics, Philadelphia, PA.

Today, I attended half a day of the Intelligent Health 2018 conference here in Basel. I felt a little out of my depth in a conference where most individuals were wearing suits, a BBC presenter introduced speakers, and a video DJ (DJ sleeper) played background music to footage from popular movies during breaks. This was buzzword-beat (AI, deep learning, digital health) and somewhat removed from the scientific conferences I usually attend. 

I got to watch a talk by a ERC-advanced grant winner, Stefano Stramigioli, who presented the MURAD project that aims to develop robots that can perform (or help with) mamography biopsies (disturbing), a panel discussion sponsored by the World Health Organisation on using data/AI to improve health care around the world (solid but somewhat uninspiring) and the two main “forward gazing” talks (the ones I was there for) by Jay Olshansky (in the flesh) and Gary Marcus (by Skype). 

The presentation by Olshansky was rather disappointing. I was expecting a talk on the promise of digital technology to deal with demographic challenges and got a pitch about an algorithm that detects age and health behaviours (smoking, BMI) from pictures of faces (apparently Olshansky sells this technology to insurance companies that want to make sure you’re not lying about such things when getting an insurance policy over the internet). 

Gary Marcus was more interesting. He’s a deep learning skeptic and gave a pitch from his upcoming book on how deep learning is too hyped in business and media alike. According to Marcus, deep learning is not close to delivering its promise on the intellectual problems that we are likely to care about in different fields, including health care. Marcus also argued that deep learning should be seen as just another tool in the artificial intelligence toolbox and that getting machines to think, plan, and reason, will require hybrid models that use other tools from AI beyond deep learning. Unfortunately, Marcus was not at all clear on how these models could look like.

This was not a conference for psychologists, yet, pychology could have a role to play in many of the topics discussed. How will humans deal with the idea of machines taking biopsies? How do we avoid “algorithm aversion” in patients, physicians, or policy-makers? It would be interesting to see some discussion of such topics in the next edition in 2019…

In the beginning of March, Mariela Jaffé, Matt Keller, and Maria Douneva flew to Atlanta to attend the annual convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. With 4,000 participants and 8 parallel sessions, there was a lot to see and experience apart from presenting own research. A non-research highlight was the student night at the aquarium – if you should ever be in Atlanta, definitely go there!

A few of us (Laura, Regina, and myself) attended this year’s meeting of the Society for Neuroeconomics, which took place from October 5 to 7 in Toronto, Canada. Highlights of the conference were the Keynote by Nobel Laureate Robert J. Shiller on Narratives in Economics, three very intense poster sessions (each of us presented a poster on one of them), and a lot of high-quality talks on different topics around the neural and cognitive basis of economically relevant behavior. Cognitive models (esp. sequential sampling models of decision making) have become a key aspect of the conference in recent years, so this conference is actually also of interest for those of us who are not using neuroscientific methods. Next year, the conference will take place at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

Obviously, the picture does not show anything from the conference or from Toronto, but the gorgeous landscape of the Algonquin Provinical Park, which I visited together with three PhD students from Paris after the conference. It is marvelous and just a 4h-drive away from the Toronto (so, basically nothing by Canadian standards).

The International Conference for Communication in Healthcare (ICCH) took place in Baltimore from October 8-11.

More than 600 people from more than 30 countries around the globe joined the conference. It was a great opportunity to connect with like-minded researchers and to learn more about interesting and well-done studies in healthcare communication. It was a pleasure for me to give a talk about the impact of information structuring in discharge communication on patients’ recall performance. I really enjoyed talking about research with well-known but also with newly met people from Norway, the Netherlands and all over the globe.

Next year’s ICCH will be held in Porto, Portugal.

Vom 20.08.2017 bis 24.08.2017 fand die alle zwei Jahre stattfindende “Subjective Probability, Utility, and Decision Making Conference” (kurz “SPUDM”) an der Technion in Tel Aviv, Israel, statt. Die SPUDM ist die Konferenz der europäischen Vereinigung für Entscheidungsforschung (EADM) und hatte dieses Jahr etwa 250 Teilnehmende aus aller Welt.

Das Programm war vollgepackt mit interessanten Symposia (unter anderem eines co-organisiert von Jörg Rieskamp), thematischen Talk-Sessions, und einer Poster-Session. Die Universität Basel war mit insgesamt zwölf Forschenden sehr prominent vertreten.

Als besonderes Highlight ist sicherlich die Keynote von Wirtschaftsnobelpreisträger Alvin E. Roth zu nennen. In seinem Vortrag beleuchtete er sogenannte “repugnant transactions”. Vereinfacht gesagt, sind das Transaktionen, die ohne Entgelt als anständig angesehen werden, die jedoch durch die Zugabe von Geld abstossend wirken. Als Kernbeispiel, welches sich durch den gesamten Vortrag zog, nannte er den Organhandel, der im Gegensatz zu unentgeltlichen Organspenden in den allermeisten Ländern der Welt verboten ist. In dem Vortrag ging es hauptsächlich darum, wie man den Mangel an Organspenden entgegenwirken kann, ohne dass die Organspende zu einer solchen repugnant transaction wird.

Wir freuen uns auf die nächste SPUDM, die 2019 in Amsterdam, Niederlande, stattfinden wird.

The Aging & Cognition 2017 Conference took place in Zurich, April 20-22. There were a number of very interesting talks and posters, including very informative overview talks by Matthias Mehl, on ecological sampling to examine effects of aging in everyday life activities and cognition, and Steven Boker, on dynamic systems and distributed testing.

Baker’s report on distributed testing was particular interesting because it introduced the idea of reversing the usual experimenter-participant relation, in which the participants provide data which the experimenter analyses and archives. In Boker’s proof-of-concept study an experiment was distributed on the internet and participants were tested by interacting with a computer program on a portable device that also conducted data analysis autonomously; summary results (i.e., model likelihoods) were then automatically returned to the experimenter, such that the data was kept by the participant at all time. This type of procedure happens to have some nice statistical properties (due to model averaging) and allows participants to never give up their data (which could be particularly interesting for sensitive data about wealth or health). There are of course, some downsides to this as well, for example, one won’t necessarily be able to replicate results if participants withdraw data access at some point during or after data collection.

Of course, even in our post-factual world, scientists aren’t likely to give up control over their data anytime soon – after all, “data is the new oil”!

Selma Rudert and I, Mariela Jaffé, participated in the 19th Conference for Personality and Social Psychology, which took place end of January 2017 in San Antonio, Texas. Different topics were covered, such as big data, preregistration, new research tools such as automated text or image analysis, and many more. Additional sessions also offered an overview about job opportunities for social psychologists outside of academia. And of course every other talk had some side remark about the ongoing political changes in the US (yes, it was inauguration day during the conference).

Selma and I attended a lot of sessions on social groups and belonging, as well as morality and social cognition. During the conference Selma chaired a symposium on ostracism and social exclusion together with Andrew Hales and gave a talk about the importance of receiving acknowledgement after a social exclusion episode. I presented a poster on the topic of diversity, to show work in which I investigated the potential double standard of individuals’ choices that show that individuals themselves might prefer to work with a similar other, while they think that others should rather work with a more different person.

We both very much enjoyed the discussions during the conference and collected lots of good input and ideas for our further research.

On January 19 the Clinical Research Day took place at the University Hospital Basel, Switzerland. Researchers from several research groups presented their current projects. The day consisted of interesting scientific presentations and engaging discussions about ongoing research at the University Hospital Basel. Victoria Siegrist, from the department of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, won the first prize for her poster “Effects of Empathy vs. Structure Skills Training in Discharge Communication in the Emergency Department”. A great day ended with the so-called Mojito-Party!

I spent the last couple of days at the 50th Conference of the German Society for Psychology (DGPs) that took place in Leipzig, Germany. The conference was well attended and covered many interesting “hot” topics, including issues of replicability and use of open methods in psychological science, social inequality, or emotion and aging.

One special treat for those at the conference was that one could sit at Wilhelm Wundt’s desk. Leipzig, of course, became known as the birthplace of experimental psychology because Wundt founded his lab there in 1879… but did you know he spent a year in Zurich right before moving to Leipzig? Wundt actually had travelled with his “psychological” instruments to/from Switzerland before his move to Leipzig – so perhaps Switzerland should lay claim to being the real birthplace of psychology!

(well, that is if we ignore the fact that Wundt had been writing and working on the same topics in Heidelberg before that…)

Die diesjährige Ausgabe der Konferenz der Society for NeuroEconomics fand vom 28.-30. August 2016 in Berlin, Deutschland, statt. Neuroeconomics ist ein Forschungsfeld an der Schnittstelle zwischen Psychologie, Ökonomie, und Neurowissenschaften. Entsprechend vielfältig waren die Themen: Von Aufmerksamkeit und Gedächtnis über soziale Einflüsse bis hin zu Konsumentenentscheidungen. Auf eher kleineren Konferenzen wie der NeuroEconomics hat man mehr Zeit sich intensiv mit den vorgestellten Postern auseinanderzusetzen, was zu zahlreichen sehr spannenden und fruchtbaren Diskussionen geführt hat. Die SWE-Abteilungen waren mit insgesamt sechs Forschenden, von denen fünf Poster vorgestellt haben, vertreten.

Loreen Mamerow and I spent the past couple of days at an interesting symposium on “Opportunities and Challenges in Cognitive Aging” at the International Academic Forum, in Heidelberg (Organisers: Dr. Markus Wettstein, Dr. Elzbieta Kozma). The symposium included keynotes by Christopher Hertzog, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Sherry Willis, University of Washington, that discussed promises and challenges of intervention programs to improve cognitive function in old age. The field has been very active, with a number of randomised control trials (RCT) emerging in the past years, including those that test the role of physical activity and the use of game-like cognitive tasks, among others. Unfortunately, it looks like the jury is still out about the role of such interventions for cognitive function (e.g., memory) and daily function (e.g., living independently). The promise seems to now lie in RCTs that combine multiple strategies and long-term outcomes – it should prove interesting to take stock of the field in a few more years once the results from these are out…

You can find the Symposiums’ program here.

Another great conference took place in Miami at the end of September, hosted by the Society of Neuroeconomics. The program featured some excellent talks covering not only core concepts within neuroeconomics (e.g. valuation, risk, time preference) but also applications to areas such as consumer behaviour, social preferences, well-being, finance and aging, memory and learning. Dr. Sebastian Gluth from the Department of Economic Psychology was one of the presenters, and he discussed his research on the influence of the attraction effect on intertemporal choice and valuation.

I presented a poster about our work at the Center for Cognitive and Decision Sciences, specifically data coming from the Basel-Berlin Risk Study. The main research questions revolve around the nature and measurement of risk taking, and the study involved testing more than 1000 individuals over several hours in the lab. In addition, 130 of the lab participants were invited back for an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) session, during which they played a couple of games inside the scanner whilst we measured their brain activation and structure. Across these two sessions, participants completed multiple self-report instruments as well as computerized tasks, giving us a rich data set to look into risk taking. The data I presented at the conference spanned a network of (inter)correlations for self-report and behavioural measures of risk taking, conjunction maps for brain activation in the two task paradigms and a 3D anatomical grid onto which we mapped associations between brain structure and risk taking measures. The conference and especially the poster session were fantastic outlets for presenting our work to the world (in particular the neuroeconomics community) and for getting feedback. Also, it was very interesting to meet other PhD students as well as more senior researchers and to see what topics other labs are working on. Next year’s meeting will take place in Berlin, Germany, which should be equally exciting.

Matthias Kliegel and colleagues at the Cognitive Aging Lab have hosted another edition of the Geneva Aging Series these past few days. I had the pleasure to attend this year and learned a lot about many developmental topics, from perception to prospective memory and social cognition. I’m looking forward to the next editions!

Here is this year’s Program.

I am off to the International Convention of Psychological Science, in Amsterdam, to participate in a symposium on Decision Making and Risk Taking Across the Life Span. Anika Josef, also affiliated with CDS, is presenting some joint work on age differences in risk taking.

CDS is busy going to conferences this week… Loreen Mamerow and I are at the Scientific Research Network on Decision Neuroscience and Aging Conference, Miami, Florida, USA, where a lot of interesting speakers are talking about their latest work on age differences in decision making.

David Kellen and Renato Frey are at the TeaP (Tagung experimentell arbeitender Psychologen, Conference of Experimental Psychologists), Hildesheim, Germany, presenting work on cognitive modeling of memory, decision making, and risk taking. You can find a pdf of the TeaP program here.