Dr Jim Blascovich is the director and co-founder of the Research Center for Virtual Environments at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he is Distinguished Professor of Psychology.

Dr Kim Peters examines the way in which our everyday gossip can, by arousing emotions, structure people‘s social relationships

Dr Jonathan Redshaw examins cognition and mental time travel in children and great apes

Dr Brenda Major is an American social psychologist and distinguished professor in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she heads the Self and Social Identity Lab.

This is an introduction to the new Podcast from the UQ School of Psychology, Just a Thought..........Hosted by Dr Nicole Nelson and Dr James Kirby

Dr Harrison completed his PhD in the School of Psychology at UQ in 2013 (advisors: Roger Remington and Jason Mattingley). A week after submitting his thesis, he moved to the USA to conduct research at the Schepens Eye Research Institute (Boston) with Peter Bex, and later moved to the UK to work with Paul Bays at the University of Cambridge. He is now a CJ Martin Early Career Fellow (NHMRC) based at the Queensland Brain Institute.

In this episode we interview Associate Professor Sam Schwarzkopf.

Assoc Prof Schwarzkopf research seeks to better understand why people perceive the world the way they do. Early experiments suggested a correlation between the functional architecture of early visual cortex and the strength of contextual visual processing. This has led us to formulate hypotheses how sensory information is interpreted by the brain for making perceptual judgements. Our on-going research uses encoding models based on population receptive field mapping to reconstruct subtle differences in stimulus processing associated with perceptual experience. We predominantly used this approach for the study of apparent stimulus size. More recently, we have also applied this method to investigate the neural signature of ambiguous perceptual grouping.