So, if you have to get up at 4am to stumble onto the first train to London to attend a bunch of talks, you really hope it's going to be worth it – and that it was!

The Keynote Seminar on Impact assembled a diverse and fascinating panel of speakers, engaging with a diverse and interested audience. And all of this in the beautiful and tangibly steeped in history Royal Society building in London.

I can't hope to summarise all of the event – with so many speakers and discussions, but some things that were said really struck a chord with me.

These points made by David Halpern, Director of the Behavioural Insights Team (points as I understood them – possibly not as he meant them)

1. Don't throw things over the wall It is not enough to publish things and sit back and hope it'll reach the right people
2. The importance of Translational bodies to communicate between researchers, policy makers and the public
3. The Zone of Proximal Development When academics, businesses, policy makers interact, they have to do so in the Zone of Proximal Development. This Vygotskyan idea of learning applied to different partners implies that what we do cannot be too far removed from our potential partners, if we want it to be of use to them.

Sophie Duncan, from the National Centre for Public Engagement

1. Don't forget the Social impact of universities
2. Impact goes beyond the REF – and much important impact is not rewarded by the REF
3. A culture change is needed in academia to make people see the importance and value of impact

Abigail Chard, Campus PR

1. Perhaps unsurprisingly for a PR professional: impact through communication – impact can be achieved through communication with stakeholders

Excellent – we have great PR people at Lincoln uni, and we can further build on that network.

Nicola Jones from Palgrave Macmillan

1. It seems obvious once you say it, but actually who is the public? the public are not just endusers but all sorts of people and they should be involved throughout the research process and not just at the end
2. Open access does not mean accessible – as academics we need to do a better job of communicating our research in such a way that it becomes accessible / understandable for people outside the immediate field of research

Graeme Rosenberg – the manager of the REF 2014 – (bravely) talked about the REF and Impact to a audience full of academics…

1. REF & Impact: should reward excellence in research and give public accountability of investment in research. It should encourage engagement with users.
2. Whilst impact has to be related back to evidence, the REF panel is not just interested in evidence from particular outputs – this in opposition to Sophie Duncan's point of the narrow focus of the REF
3. The REF panel assessing impact will have endusers – not just academic users – assessing the work
4. And the million dollar questions: just what is a 4 star publication? Well, the REF panel will go through a calibration process and then it is down to judgement (<to me this sounds like “no one knows….”)

Lianne Deeming, engineer and member of REF panel

1. “It takes 7 seconds to make a first impression, how long does it take to quantify impact of research?” Hopefully not much longer – it should be apparent from the first sentence of a case study what the impact of the research is

Mark Holmes – Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

1. Economic impact is important and easier to measure, but it's not the only impact that matters
2. Not just influencing policy but achieving policy outcomes
3. Policy makers are not always aware that they use publicly funded research to guide their decisions

Well, you probably had to be there. Much food for thought and great to see so much diversity in opinion. Whether any of this can be translated into tangible improvements to impact or research – we will have to see.

Posted with Blogsy

This year’s Summer Scientist event is previewed in the Lincolnshire Echo. Here is the blog entry on the Summer Scientist page about the coverage.

Every summer the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln holds a Summer Scientist week. We invite children (and their parents) from all over Lincolnshire to join us for a morning or afternoon of free fun games and exciting research studies! Children from 3 to 10 years old and their parents take part in a variety of research studies which are designed to be fun games run by academic university staff. In between these research games, children are entertained by a host of other fun activities led by a team of trained psychology students. Come and join us for science and fun!

To take part and book a place visit the Summer Scientist Webpage.

 

Lincoln Academy Guest Lecture

location  EMMTEC

purpose  Public lecture on my research

more questions? email me fziegler@lincoln.ac.uk

lecture abstract. 

Imagination is not just fun and children’s games but underpins many of the key skills we need for navigating our social world. Other people’s thoughts and minds are not visible but at some stage in development children take a mental leap to attribute other people with these invisible mental states. This results in the skill to ‘get into the heads of others’, allowing for meaningful disentanglement of communication, being discrete, tactful, empathic and also understanding and predicting other people’s behaviour.

Seeing into the future is important when we make decisions, because we have to imagine what the outcome of a decision is going to be and which one will make us happier. But why, if imagination is so powerful, do we often fail to see things from someone else’s point of view and get some small and some big decisions quite wrong? The development, the success and the failures can tell us much about the workings of the mechanism itself.

Here are some further reading materials on key topics covered in the lecture. 

Alief and belief

The concept of alief (why are you scared on the Grand Canyon skywalk?) was introduced by Tamar Szabo Gendler. The key paper was published 2008 in the Journal of Pilosophy, and you can read it here: http://pantheon.yale.edu/~tgendler/documents/aliefbeliefjphilfinal.pdf

Social Function of Mindreading

An excellent paper on the Social Function of Intellect was published by Nicholas Humphrey. It is highly readable and you can find it here http://www.humphrey.org.uk/papers/1976SocialFunction.pdf

Daydreaming 

Paul Bloom’s book of How pleasure works is an exciting journey through the things that are pleasures in our lives – and why.

Decision making

One of the most important people in decision making research is Nobel laureate  Daniel Kahneman and his most recent book Thinking fast and slow covers the background and cutting edge research on decision making – and why we are bad at it.

For copies of the articles on my research making decisions for others, please email me.

How does mindreading develop?

A recent review paper presents my ideas of how children develop the skills to get into the heads of others. Email me for a copy of a recent review paper.

Spontaneous perspective-taking

My PhD research on children’s perspective-taking in narratives is available in a short article. Email me for a copy.

The paper on spatial perspectives is currently undergoing revision. If you email me I will send you a copy.

Multiple Selves

The idea of multiple selves has been described by several psychologists and philosophers. Human mind is perhaps composed of multiple selves: the self that chooses in advance and the self that faces the consequences of that decision (e.g. Ainslie, 1992).  The Implicit notion is that future selves are treated like other people. In the sense that a person as succession of different but overlapping selves, and future selves are therefore like others (Parfit, 1971).

Imagination and schizophrenia

The philosopher Greg Currie has written about schizophrenia as a disorder of the imagination in the book Recreative Minds. You can find more information on this here