東北大学Neuro Global
国際共同大学院プログラム

加齢医学研究所
D3 LIU Yu

The Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology (ESCOP) of 2023 was held in University of Porto at Portugal. It was a great pleasure attending in this society and I really enjoyed the talks and symposiums. The ESCOP proved to be not only a professional conference for cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists to share their data and results, but also a dynamic platform for fellow researchers to communicate and exchange ideas, and I very much appreciate the NGP fellowship for the financial support of this conference. Here in this report, I will write some of my experience and insights about this event.

The event was held from 4th to 6th of September, consisting of one day of workshops and three days of academic presentations. The atmosphere at the venue was very relaxing and it feel more like a social party rather than a serious academic conference. Every day there were several sessions of academic symposiums and report sessions lasting approximately 90 minutes where researchers introduce their research and share results. Between these presentations, attendees are free to communicate with each other during the coffee break, poster presentations were also arranged during this period and the whole venue feels very lively. It was actually the first time for me to attend in an international conference and I was really surprised to see so many researchers who are really enthusiastic about their project. Their passion and dedication impressed me a lot.

I gave a presentation of my work during the blitz-talk session on the third day of the conference. Blitz-talks are short talk sessions where researchers present preliminary results from a single experiment. Each presenter had 5 minutes to present his/her result followed by 5 minutes of Q&A. It was actually very difficult to introduce a research project in such a short period of time. My study was about moral decision-making, so I decided to skip most of the complicated parts of psychological models and cut straight into the topic with the well-known trolley problem. In my talk, I introduced the application of fictional characters in the moral dilemmas tasks, and that the result of behavioral experiment had indicated novel insights to the traditional parallel model of emotion-reason in the process of decision-making.

I presumed that listeners would come from a vast range of research fields, so I tried to explain the significance of the results in the plainest language. To my surprise, most of the questions I received was about the method part. People seemed to be more interested in the fictional characters used in the task. I received the question that asks me how I create these characters so to let participants react as I expect them to be. I always receive this question when I introduce my study to other colleagues in the lab and in the university, so I explained how we used web survey to collect ideas and how we combine those ideas to make stories. I also received questions asking me how I plan to further proceed with the research and if I intend to modify this dilemma task even more. I said that my interest lies in neural correlates so the current task would do the job, but I was really happy to see that people are very interested in the discussion of this topic.

Listening to the talk of other fellow researchers also brought novel insights to my own study. In the talk of Deciding when to help others depends on the expected value of the environment, Todd and his colleagues showed that the expected reward value and the reward probability could influence peoples’ decision on helping self and others. It is surprising to see that participants’ willingness of helping others is more sensitive on the expected reward than helping themselves. I interpret this result as prosocial behaviors are more utilitarian than simple benefit-seeking behaviors. As when the expected reward is returned to others but not the deciding person, he/she may be held back by the lack of positive outcomes. This inspired me that when participants in my study are making moral decisions that are less relevant to their own benefits, reasoning-driven utilitarian thinking may be weighed more and to some extent influence the final decision.

In another interesting study conducted by Danyang L., they applied a novel task to see if people are more subject to change their mind in a moral-evaluation task utilizing real-world images. They found that missing information about the real-world event will increase the probability of changing the moral evaluation due to population cues. I think this result indicates that people are more likely to fill the missing pieces of information based on stereotypes and their basic moral belief. This also brings new perspectives into my study as the fictional characters are depicted by episodes of stories. Participants may fill the missing blanks in the character according to their experiences and belief. Although such personalized judgements are partly included in the individual variations in the analysis method I used, but such stereotype-based impressions may influence participants’ judgements. It was during the poster session on the last day that I saw this study and we had a very deep and productive communication over the topic. Also, I was very excited to see that there are other peoples like me, interested in the study of moral behaviors.

In addition to the presentations mentioned above, I also listened to other talks and symposiums regard working memory, cognitive control, and language etc. Workshops on the first day was also helpful. I received lectures from the development team of Psychopy, a most commonly used software to make behavior tasks, on how to improve and custom the codes in order to make more complicated tasks. Another workshop I attended gave a basic introduction to the application of R language. I have used R-based packages for data analysis before, but I had totally no idea how it worked so this workshop was a great help. Days were busy but not much tiring. You could find drinks and snacks during the coffee breaks, and freely talk to other colleagues about their research, most are very friendly and easy to talk to.

While attending the session and listening to presentations, I’ve also found that the style of presentation is very important. I saw researchers who are very professional in their field but are not so good at doing presentations. They jumped straight into their research questions with a ton of terminologies that are difficult to understand, filling slides with numbers and definitions. On the other hand, there were also researchers who made complicated ideas very easy to understand. And the effect can be clearly told at the Q&A sessions. Listening and comparing those presentations from various people is really helpful to improving my presentation skills.

I also realized that it is very important to learn to communicate and to be social as a researcher. People are so much connected in the current days and it’s not possible to conduct research without reaching others. Keeping up with the recent progress of the field will bring new ideas and insights into my own study, helping me to make high-quality academic papers. On the contrary, it is also important to do my part and make contribution to the society by presenting and sharing my work.

In conclusion, it has been a very productive and pleasant experience attending the ESCOP 2023 in Portugal. Attending such international conferences are very helpful in promoting my study, improving presentation skills and more importantly, in building future career as a researcher. I really enjoyed the conference and I very much appreciate the NGP fellowship for the support.