24/11 11am-12pm: Demystifying the PhD Viva

Erdenejargal Erdenechuluun — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 10:18:08 GMT

When: 11:00 - 12:00, Tue, 24 Nov '26

Where: 1.61 Psychology Building

Internal speaker: Professor Kim Wade and former PhD students

Host: Dr Chiara Gambi

Abstract: Have you ever wondered what happens during the PhD viva? What goes on behind those closed doors? And how can you prepare for it? All these questions and more will be answered in a panel discussion with former PhD students led by Professor Kim Wade.

10/11 12pm-1pm: What does it take to learn together?

Erdenejargal Erdenechuluun — Mon, 02 Nov 2026 10:17:43 GMT

When: 12:00 - 13:00, Tue, 10 Nov '26

Where: 1.61 Psychology Building

Abstract: Learning rarely happens in isolation. Across development and into adulthood, our interactions with others shape how we acquire and retain new knowledge, whether at home with family, at school with teachers and peers, or at work with colleagues. Learning with others requires us to coordinate our behaviour in order to exchange information effectively. Studying learning in social contexts therefore offers a valuable opportunity to investigate how people communicate and understand one another. In this talk, I will present evidence from studies combining large-scale online experiments, naturalistic hyperscanning and eye-tracking, involving neurotypical adolescents and adults, as well as autistic adults. Together, these studies investigate how the opportunity to interact influences learning, and the role of interpersonal processes such as joint attention, mutual gaze, behavioural responsiveness and neural synchrony. I will discuss findings suggesting that learning depends not simply on how much people coordinate, but on how and when they do so. I will also explore how these dynamics may change across development. Finally, I will discuss how understanding what makes human social interaction beneficial for learning could help us explore whether similar benefits can emerge when learning with AI, or whether some aspects of human social learning remain unique.

Biography: Sara De Felice is a cognitive neuroscientist and Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the Italian Institute of Technology (IIT) in Rome. She completed her PhD at University College London (UCL), followed by postdoctoral research at the University of Cambridge. Her work has received several awards, including the Experimental Psychology Society's Frith Prize for outstanding doctoral research and UCL's Jon Driver Prize for excellence in neuroscience research. Combining behavioural experiments, eye-tracking and neuroimaging (fNIRS and EEG hyperscanning), she investigates how people interact, communicate and learn together, with a particular focus on teacher-learner interactions. She also studies how these processes vary across development and in neurodivergent populations. Her broader goal is to understand what makes human social interaction successful and distinctive, including what this means for learning with AI systems.

Webpage: Personal website | Google Scholar

Psychology Department, 91Ӱ���ƽ�� » Calendar of events

24/11 11am-12pm: Demystifying the PhD Viva

10/11 12pm-1pm: What does it take to learn together?

Psychology Department, 91Ӱ��ƽ�� » Calendar of events