Levelling the playing field: Invited talk in Stirling

Person and group categories in memory, impression formation, and face processing Ken had the privilege of being invited to speak in the seminar program in the School of Psychology at Stirling. Given the shared interest in issues of social face processing, the talk emphasised the work we have done on perceiving person and group information … Read more

Ken gives Person Category talk in Linköping, Sweden

Ken had an opportunity to present the work on Person Categories to the Department of Behavioural Sciences and Learning at Linköping University while in town for the conference keynote address at the GRASP 2014 conference.  The talk led to some interesting conversations afterward and was a chance to meet a wider group from the local department. … Read more

Ken gives St Andrews seminar on Person Categories

Ken recently gave the local friday afternoon school seminar in St Andrews. The title of the talk was “The person categorisation heresies: Persons AS categories, and implications for a unified theory of social categorisation”. St Andrews is an ideal place for us to pursue this work, given the great intellectual atmosphere and intellectual interest shared … Read more

Ken presenting at BPS social section in Exeter

Ken presented a talk at the BPS social psychology section conference in Exeter.  The talk titled “Challenging the effect of cognitive load on the efficiency of categorization versus individuation” presented several studies from Daniel Skorich’s PhD on impression formation and cognitive resources. The conference was also a good opportunity to continue some collaborations with several … Read more

Skorich and Mavor at the Jena Meeting 2013

Daniel and Ken attended the 15th Jena meeting at castle Oppurg from the 4th to the 7th of July 2013. The theme for the meeting this year was ‘The puzzle of “me” and “I”: Individual and Collective Perspectives on Self and Identity’. The Jena meeting is a very productive environment for cutting edge work and theory development set … Read more

Skorich PhD awarded

We congratulate Daniel Skorich on the award of his PhD today!  His thesis entitled “Motivated but confounded tacticians: Revisiting the relationship between categorization and cognitive resources” returns to an important debate about the relationship between the availability of cognitive resources and phenomena such as stereotyping and categorical face perception. Daniel’s thesis challenges the dominant view … Read more

Mavor at John C Turner Commemoration Symposium

A collection of John Turner’s past and present colleagues and students gathered at University House, ANU, Canberra to discuss  John’s massive contribution to the theory of intergroup relations through Social Identity and Self Categorization Theories.  (John Turner pictured right). Ken Mavor was one of 21 invited speakers for the 3 day symposium, and spoke on … Read more

Person and group impressions and cognitive load

Cognitive load privileges memory-based over data-driven processing, not group-level over person-level processing The first paper from Daniel Skorich’s PhD has been published online at BJSP. This establishes the empirical support for our view that group information is not used in preference to person information due to resource limitations.  This paper overturns a classic assumption of the cognitive … Read more