This talk will introduce and define intellectual humility. Results will be presented from three studies showing that intellectual humility is related to less political polarization and misinformation susceptibility. That is, intellectual humility may help people to not disparage political outgroup members, hold extreme political views, and turn to false information in times of uncertainty. In sum, intellectual humility is a compelling vehicle for understanding when, why, and how people form and hold certain beliefs over others. Shauna is a sixth-year Ph.D. student in Emory University’s clinical psychology doctoral program. She worked with the late Dr. Scott Lilienfeld and currently work with Dr. Arber Tasimi (Morality and Development Lab). Broadly, she is interested in how personality intersects with beliefs. Specifically, she focuses on intellectual humility and its potential implications for political polarization and misinformation susceptibility. In the long-term, she hopes to understand the building blocks of irrational thinking and leverage intervention science to help people make changes in their beliefs.

Women are more affected by Alzheimer’s disease (AD) than men, but the reasons for this phenomenon are still unknown. In this sense, it is crucial to understand resilience mechanisms that may delay cognitive impairment in women. Resilience has been at the heart of health research over the past decades to study how people achieve normal or better than expected outcomes despite exposure to healthy aging, neurodegeneration or stroke. In this sense, resilience can explain individual differences in rates of cognitive impairment and why people show different outcomes despite facing the same neurological disorders. In this seminar, I will discuss how linguistic diversity together with molecular mechanisms may be related to neuroplasticity and women’s resilience against Alzheimer’s disease. Noelia Calvo is a Linguist and PhD in Psychology from Argentina. She is now working as a postdoctoral fellow at the Einstein lab. Dr. Calvo researches risk and reserve proxies in dementia. She is particularly interested in the role of language, ethnicity and biological sex in Alzheimer’s disease. To understand the interactive effects of different social determinants of health, Dr. Calvo uses behavioral data (quantitative and qualitative) together with neuroimaging techniques, and multivariate analysis. The ultimate goal of her research is to facilitate and promote health equity in the study and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases.

Brain fingerprinting is a new approach that is advancing our understanding of individual differences in both brain activity and its relations to behaviour. Recent work has demonstrated that individuals can be differentiated from each other using brief recordings of brain activity. These results propose that an individual’s brain activity is characteristic to themselves like a fingerprint left by your hand; but unlike the fingerprints left by the hand, brain-fingerprints can be used to predict cognitive abilities. Yet, little is known about how brain fingerprints change with age. I demonstrate how individuals from a large cohort can be differentiated from one another regardless of their age. On the other hand, the specific brain regions most useful for differentiating individuals differ between young and older adults. Brain regions that are more useful for differentiating young adults support cognition and abstract thought, while brain regions more typical of older adult brain-fingerprints are responsible for sensory and motor functions. These regions more typical of older-adults also demonstrate the greatest structural changes with age, and are sparse in specific neurochemical systems. Taken together, this study demonstrates the importance of considering differences in the most useful brain features to differentiate individuals when studying in populations with varying demographics and cognitive abilities. Jason is a PhD student at the IPN in Dr. Sylvain Baillet's lab. He studies individual differences in brain activity and how these differences are characteristic to people like a fingerprint. These so-called brain fingerprints are useful to understand brain-behaviour relationships and machine learning algorithms. His other research interests include consciousness, and the cognitive neuroscience of attention.