Christopher Erb

CMND Lab Director, Senior Lecturer

Christopher Erb's Website: www.cmndlab.com

Capturing the Mind in Action: Is Psychology Ready to Move Beyond Response Times?

Button-press measures of response time and accuracy have long served as cornerstones of perceptual and cognitive psychology. However, hand-tracking techniques like mouse tracking and reach tracking have become increasingly popular tools for investigating how processes across perception, cognition, and action unfold over time. In this talk, I will discuss how my colleagues and I have used hand tracking to investigate the dynamics of attention and cognitive control. First, I will describe my PhD research investigating the within- and cross-trial dynamics of cognitive control in congruency tasks such as the Eriksen flanker task. Next, I will explore how I took the advice of a PhD mentor by investigating developmental, individual, and task differences during my post-doctoral research. Finally, I will present recent research from student-led projects in my lab that use Virtual Reality headsets to measure hand and eye movements as participants complete tasks assessing attention, memory, and cognitive control.

Kealagh Robinson

Massey University, Senior Lecturer

Subjective beliefs versus objective performance: What non-suicidal self-injury can tell us about emotion

Emotions play a vital role in our lives—they capture our attention, motivate us to action, and enable us to respond to our environment. However, sometimes emotions ‘get in the way’ of achieving our goals, and we need to be able to flexibly employ strategies to change our emotional response. Widespread difficulties regulating emotions results in emotion dysregulation, hampering an individual’s ability to work towards their goals. Emotion dysregulation is a transdiagnostic risk factor for subsequent mental health challenges, including non-suicidal self-injury. People who self-injure consistently report experiencing greater emotion dysregulation than their peers. However, global self-reports provide an overall evaluation of one’s emotional landscape, making them unable to isolate precise alterations in emotional responding that may serve as effective intervention targets. In this keynote, I will discuss work my collaborators and I have conducted to understand the nature of non-suicidal self-injury in Aotearoa New Zealand, before presenting findings from a series of experiments examining how people who self-injure respond to real-time emotional challenges. I will end with a reflection on what I have learnt working across psychology disciplines and offer some unsolicited advice to postgraduate students beginning their careers in psychological science.