Calendar of events

Title: Dyadic Interaction Platform: A novel tool to study transparent social interactions

Abstract: Research on social cognition examines how people perceive, interpret, and respond to others and social situations. Many real-life social interactions occur during direct face-to-face contact and depend on immediate, continuous feedback about mutual behavior and environmental changes. However, experimental laboratory settings for dyadic interactions often lack these essential naturalistic conditions. Here, we describe a novel experimental setting, the Dyadic Interaction Platform (DIP), designed to investigate the behavioral and neural mechanisms of real-time social interactions. The DIP features a transparent screen that allows two participants to view visual stimuli and each other simultaneously, facilitating face-to-face interaction in a shared vertical workspace. Various versions of the DIP facilitate interactions between two human adults, adults and children, two children, nonhuman primates, and mixed nonhuman-human dyads. The platforms allow for diverse manipulations of interactive contexts and synchronized recordings of both participants’ behavioral, physiological, and neural measures. Thus, the DIP offers a unique balance: the rigorous control of a laboratory in an intuitive, socially salient setting. We demonstrate how this platform integrates economic game theory with sensorimotor processing across a variety of tasks, such as value-based strategic coordination, dyadic foraging, and social learning.

Host: Chiara Gambi

Title: Children's personal interests shape their language development

Abstract: Over the first two years of life, children’s vocabularies grow rapidly and by 30 months, children produce more than 400 words (Frank et al., 2017). Notably, despite the presence of a shared vocabulary, the specific words which young children learn are highly idiosyncratic, reflecting the unique interests and experiences that shape their language development. In my talk, I will present work on how children’s personal preferences and interests influence their learning. Our research has shown that children learn preferably what they find more interesting in the moment (Eiteljoerge et al., 2020, 2025). Furthermore, they learn and retain novel word-object associations when they are interested in the category the novel object belongs to (Ackermann et al., 2020, 2023). Moreover, in the absence of other cues, children use their own interests to decide with which novel object a novel label should be associated with (Ackermann, Eiteljoerge et al., 2025). On-going research will extend these findings to investigate the influence of personal interests on word learning in adults, using a trivia questions paradigm to explore whether this learning strategy can still be observed in adulthood. Overall, these findings suggest that children's interests play a critical role in shaping their language learning and highlight the importance of considering individual interests and motivations in the development of language learning strategies.

Short bio:

Sarah received a BA in General Linguistics and English Studies from the University of Göttingen in 2014 and a MSc in Language Sciences & Psychology from University College London. Her research focused on the acquisition of pragmatic elements, namely scalar implicatures, in young children, and how contextual and structural components can influence children's performance.

During her PhD with Prof. Dr. Nivedita Mani in Göttingen, she investigated word and action learning in young children and extended her work to how children’s preferences influence

their learning choices. After a short lectureship in Vienna, Sarah now continues her postdoctoral research back in Göttingen where she explores how children’s own characteristics like interest and personality in interaction with a child’s environment and social partners shape learning.

Selected publications

Ackermann, L., Förster, M., Schaarschmidt, J., Hepach, R., Mani, N., & Eiteljoerge, S. (2023). The role of interest in young children’s retention of words. Infant and Child Development, e2466. https://doi.org/10.1002/icd.2466

Ackermann, L.*, Eiteljoerge, S.*, Wasmuth, C., Johnson, E. K., & Mani, N. (2025, currently under review). Children’s interests guide word learning in referentially ambiguous situations (H5y2f_v1). PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/h5y2f_v1

Eiteljoerge, S.*, Outters, V.*, Schildknecht, J., & Mani, N. (2025). I learn what I like: Children’s preferences but not maternal IDS influence word learning from IDS and ADS. Language Learning and Development, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/15475441.2025.2456253

Host: Charlotte Gannon

Title: University Press Strategic Review

Abstract: In the past decade the number of new, open-access scholar-led institutional presses in the UK, hosted by universities themselves has been slowly rising: in part as a response to the increasingly unsustainably commercialised publishing landscape as well as shifts to more open publishing. While the University of Warwick Press (UWP) was established some time ago and hosts some journals and a very modest monograph publishing programme already, following an outline review in '23, a yearlong strategic review project is currently evaluating and exploring new paradigms and configurations of operation by a newly created role: the Press Manager. This work will culminate in creating a business case with a range of future models for the University to decide upon. As crucial part of informing this work the Press Manager is engaging in a range of community consultations, talking with scholars and practitioners about how their own publishing aspirations, insights and experiences might be reflected in a future iteration of the Press. As such, this brief talk will give insights into UWP’ current operations, the ongoing project and provide a focus for informal discussions to help inform the thinking around this work.

Host: Professor Fiona MacCallum

Title: Measuring What Matters: Bridging Research, Practice, and Lived Experience in Perinatal and Parent–Infant Mental Health 

Abstract: This seminar draws on a programme of research on perinatal mental health measurement and screening, with a particular focus on perinatal anxiety. Using examples from the development, validation, and cross-cultural adaptation of perinatal-specific measures, the talk examines how decisions about what we measure influence evidence generation, interpretation, and clinical screening, with downstream consequences for who is identified, supported, and included in perinatal mental health care. The presentation will reflect on the academic–clinical gap through the lens of measurement, highlighting both challenges and opportunities, and will argue for more collaborative, inclusive, and implementation-aware approaches to research that genuinely improve perinatal and parent–infant mental health research and practice.

Host: Dr Adam Jowett

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Title: PPIE/Co-production in Research

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Host: Katy Stokes

The session will highlight, via Prosper Portal resources and practical examples, the scope of competencies that early career researchers have which make them suited to a wide range of careers.

The session will also showcase how Prosper can be used to support effective career development conversations between postdocs and their managers – and how the Prosper Portal offers advice on what career development support looks like for those managing early career researchers

This session will be interactive, and offer recommended actions to encourage participants to put into practice the learning outcomes from the session.

During this session, participants will:

• Recognise the breadth of skills and competencies researchers develop, how these are transferable and valued across a wide range of sectors – including beyond academia.
• Explore the concept of ‘squiggly’ careers by considering case studies of early career researchers who have found success in non-traditional pathways.
• Consider how they can develop their own definitions of career success and become aware of Prosper resources which can help them to explore career pathways tailored to their own needs.
• Learn how to hold effective career development conversations – as a postdoc, and as a manager.

Host: Dr Olga Feher

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Host: Professor Adam Sanborn

Title: How would I feel tomorrow? Towards a mechanistic understanding of subjective pain experiences.

Abstract:  In this talk I suggest that tests of pain perception help validate theories of emotion. I will describe empirical support for predictive processing accounts of pain perception and how we used both group averages and individual difference approaches to examine this account. I will argue that our approach offers reliable, valid, objective quantification of the psychological drivers of pain at the level of the individual which may be useful in clinical pain settings.

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Host: Dr Suzanne Aussems

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Host: Dr Matthew Mak

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Host: Professor Nicole Tang

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