Location: Dome Room and Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847)

Speaker: Linda Zou, University of Maryland

Title: Two Axes of Racial Subordination

Abstract: The United States’ racial and ethnic landscape continues to undergo transformative shifts, with post-1960s immigration playing a large role. The expanded presence of Latino Americans, Asian Americans, and other racial and ethnic minority groups has underscored the need to better incorporate these groups’ experiences into social psychological scholarship and research. In this talk, I will first provide support for a two-dimensional Racial Position Model that goes beyond the traditional racial hierarchy to explore how the two axes of perceived inferiority and cultural foreignness together shape racial and ethnic minority groups’ distinct experiences in the U.S. Next, I will present recent findings exploring the implications of groups’ two-dimensional racial positioning for building intra-minority solidarity across different racial and ethnic minority groups.

Speaker: Justin Parent, Brown/URI

Title: The Impact of Enhancing Parenting on Child DNA Methylation

Abstract: Research with rodents, non-human primates, and children demonstrates that the early caregiving environment plays a critical role in the development of physiological systems involved in regulating stress-reactivity. A key process by which experiences of early environmental adversity might influence risk for the development of later psychopathology is through biological embedding of adversity exposure via epigenetic changes (i.e., DNA methylation - DNAm). Despite the promise and progress of social epigenomic research on risk processes (e.g., maltreatment), a significant limitation of the extant literature is that a basic understanding of how biological embedding of adversity can be prevented or reversed has yet to be achieved, with little understanding of the role of protective factors that impact these developmental trajectories. This presentation will highlight early findings on how enhancing parenting alters the epigenome among at-risk preschoolers and establishes a biological foundation that promotes resiliency and prevents the development of psychopathology.

Speaker: Miranda Scolari (Texas Tech University)

Title: From Sensory Processing to Decision Making: Exploring the Role of Selective Attention

Abstract: Selective attention prioritizes a subset of visual input in service of behavioral goals, such that responses to attended information are faster and/or more accurate compared to the unattended. This selection can occur based on several external properties, such as a relevant object’s expected location (space-based selection) or an expected feature (e.g., color; feature-based selection). Space- and feature-based attention are regularly treated as separable mechanisms that can be deployed simultaneously when unique and relevant information from both dimensions is known in advance to the observer. However, research findings have been mixed as to whether these should be ascribed to common or independent sources. In a series of experiments from my lab (Liang & Scolari, 2020; Liang, Poquiz, & Scolari, 2023), we modeled latent components of perceptual decision making during a visual search task, which points to a dual processing approach: Selection mechanisms behave independently within sensory processing but interactively within higher-order processes. Furthermore, this interaction is task dependent. The onset time of perceptual evidence accumulation (non-decision time) and the amount of information required before generating a response (response caution) are modulated by the reliability of the multidimensional pre-cue. Post hoc analyses of the pupillometry data collected during each experiment consistently revealed a similar relationship between whole pre-cue reliability and changes in pupil size, and in turn, changes in pupil size reliably predicted response caution across experiments (Liang & Scolari, in preparation). Together, this line of research provides converging evidence for a dual process model of selective attention, while also offering insight into the specific cognitive processes that may be tracked with pupillometry.

Location: Dome Room and Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847)

Speaker: Amit Goldenberg, Asst. Prof., Harvard University

Title: Homophily and Acrophily as Drivers of Political Segregation

Abstract: Political segregation is a significant social problem in the U.S., increasing polarization, sowing division and discord, and impeding effective governance. Most prior work views the central driver of political segregation to be political homophily, the tendency to associate with others with similar political views. Here, however, we propose that in addition to being driven by political homophily, people’s decisions about who to affiliate with are also driven by political acrophily, the tendency to associate with others with more extreme (rather than more moderate) political views than one’s own. We evaluated our homophily and acrophily predictions using both an experimental tie-selection paradigm and analysis of social media data. We found that both liberal and conservative participants’ decisions reflected a mix of homophily and acrophily. These studies identify a previously overlooked tendency in political tie formation, uncover a mechanism driving that tendency, and model how this tendency may increase levels of segregation in political networks.

Speaker: Sabine Kastner (Princeton)

Title: TBA

Abstract: TBA

Location: Dome Room and Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/95166664847)

Speaker: Semir Tatlidil, Grad Student, CLPS

Title: How do people create abstract representations of causal events?

Abstract: TBA