What's On at UWA

Focused visual attention is a mechanism by which relevant visual information is selectively prioritised for further processing. Given this vital role, focused attention is essential for the efficient visual perception of a world that is not only richly varied, but also continually changing. Great strides have been made in understanding the shifting of focused attention from one object or location to another, but relatively little is known about an independent and equally critical component of attentional control – attentional focusing.

The term attentional focusing refers to the fact that the focus of attention flexibly expands and contracts in spatial extent to encompass larger or smaller objects or regions of space. Despite the relative lack of research on focusing, it profoundly affects many aspects of visual perception and has substantial ramifications for cognition. In this seminar, I will present data on three inter-related aspects of attentional focusing: the spatiotemporal dynamics of focusing, object representations and their role in focusing, and the consequences of focusing on visual processing.

The application process for the 2014 Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Programme will be opening soon.

The Programme seeks to enhance internationalisation in Japan by promoting mutual understanding between the people of Japan and those of other nations. It aims to enhance foreign language education and promote international exchange at the local level through the fostering of ties between Japanese youth and foreign youth alike. The objectives of the Programme are achieved by offering participants the opportunity to serve in local authorities as well as public and private primary, junior high and senior high schools.

A committee member of the JET Alumni Association of WA and staff from the Consulate-General of Japan in Perth will be at this seminar to answer your questions.

Explore the array of coursework and research programs on offer, learn about admission requirements, postgraduate scholarships and talk to staff, honours and postgraduate students.

A series of information sessions will run alongside the Expo to allow you to discover more about postgraduate study opportunities at UWA. Register online for your preferred session.

There's no need to register your attendance at the Expo itself.

The Berndt Museum presents a free screening of the film Ten Canoes on Wednesday 25 September 2013, 6:30pm at the Robert Street Lecture Theatre.

Set in and around the Arafura Wetlands of Central Arnhem Land in a time before Western contact, Ten Canoes is the tale of young Dayindi (James Gulpilil) who covets his brother’s wife.

It is a timeless parable that transcends cultural borders and gives a rare glimpse into Aboriginal life and Australia’s mythical past. Narrated by David Gulpilil and directed by Rolf de Heer.

Watch the trailer: http://www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au/publicprogram#tencanoes

Public Program: This FREE event is part of the Berndt Museum public program accompanying the current exhibition (Little Painting, Big Stories) at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. For similar events visit the website: http://www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au/publicprogram

Campus Partner: The Campus Partner for this exhibition is the Graduate School of Education

In 2013 a six-member Royal Commission was established in Australia to investigate Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse. This is the latest in a large number of such commissions that have been established around the world in recent years. It is clear that it will report many cases of abuse in various educational institutions, many run by the Catholic Church. And yet, like all such reports, I suspect it will – quite understandably – concentrate on agency rather than structure. In other words, while it will seek to document the situation and, quite correctly, lay blame where it needs to be laid, it may not make us any wiser in terms of trying to understand how the abuse could have taken place. Adopting the perspective of the educational historian, I wish to suggest one of many avenues that could be taken in investigations aimed at trying to generate such understanding, specifically in the case of institutions run by the Catholic Church, while recognising that the matter also needs to be addressed in the case of other churches, and for other non-state and state-run institutions.

This course is aimed at anyone wishing to improve their survey questionnaires. This course is useful for both people new to questionnaire design and those who have experience and would like to extend their knowledge. It will be a benefit not only for people who anticipate designing a questionnaire in the future, but for those in the role of critiquing commissioned or existing research.

UWA Postgraduate Research students receive subsidised fees.

The Robin Winkler Clinic at The University of Western Australia will be conducting a SMOKING CESSATION treatment program commencing on Wednesday 9th October 2013. The group will meet for two hours each week for ten sessions, with an initial assessment session before the group commences and a follow-up session one month after completion.

The Smoking Cessation treatment program combines nicotine replacement therapy with cognitive-behavioural therapy to help people beat the chemical addiction, as well as the addiction to the habit of smoking itself. The majority of people who complete this science-informed group program become non-smokers and are still smoke-free one month after the group has ended.

The group sessions will be held on Wednesday evenings at 6pm-8pm. The fee is $30 per session for a total of $300 (or $225 if paid in total in the first week; i.e. a 25% saving). The initial assessment and follow-up session will also cost $30 each.

If you would like to reserve a place in the next smoking cessation group, or would like more information, please contact the Robin Winkler Clinic on 6488 2644 or [email protected]

A cover letter is usually the first part of the application process that an employer reads. It is a one page document highlighting how you would be perfect for the position. Writing a high impact cover letter encourages the employer to turn the page and read your resume.

ABSTRACT: Two critical and interrelated means of success in the workplace are maximizing one’s current performance by exploiting existing skills, and improving one’s future performance by developing ones skills. In the short-run, trade-offs often exist between learning and performance; time spent learning is often time that could instead be spent performing.

Aaron Schmidt is a Marvin D. Dunnette Professor of Industrial/Organizational Psychology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He received his Ph.D. in I/O Psychology from Michigan State University in 2003. Prior to joining the faculty at UMN in 2009, he was an assistant professor of I/O Psychology at The University of Akron. His research focuses on various aspects of work motivation, particularly the self-regulation of time and effort.

ABSTRACT: Two critical and interrelated means of success in the workplace are maximizing one’s current performance by exploiting existing skills, and improving one’s future performance by developing ones skills. In the short-run, trade-offs often exist between learning and performance; time spent learning is often time that could instead be spent performing. However, very little is known about when and why individuals forego short-term performance to engage in learning behavior or vice versa. The primary goal of this research is to understand what factors influence individuals’ decisions regarding the allocation of resources to developing skills vs. exploiting existing skills. This presentation will describe a theoretical account of how individuals manage such trade-offs, as well as empirical research evaluating key aspects of the proposed model.

As researchers in a research-intensive university, we are encouraged to build a coherent research agenda. As research leaders, we encourage our colleagues to articulate a plan and to build a research strategy with international collaborations and ISI targets. Collectively we monitor our outputs and we are monitored for our impact. In this seminar I describe the range of research activities in which I have engaged since taking my current role at UWA. Mostly my focus is school leadership, both its development and its role in driving student learning. However, in reflecting on five years of research, I see that my progress is not always linear, nor is the agenda completely coherent. The research includes long term international partners, such as Durham University, new international collaborations in China and Iceland, complex collaborations across the country including Mission Australia and Ted Noff’s Foundation, and small activities involving one other researcher, for example, my collaborations with novice researchers in Iceland and Bhutan. Some are funded through competitive grants and industry support, and others are entirely unfunded. I have undertaken research with sophisticated software, such as PIPS, InCAS, NuLit, Appraise and EYLND, longitudinal surveys, such as the Perspectives of Leadership Development, as well as narrative inquiry. As I reflect on the purposes of this patchwork of research I begin to understand that there are many worthwhile goals apart from adding to the body of useful knowledge. My talk is framed around a set of purposes – intended and unintended – and its consequences for publications.

A successful interview can win you the job. This workshop will provide you with techniques that will maximise your chances of being selected. We’ll give you hints and tips on how to anticipate interview questions and prepare effectively.

Jennifer Post, an ethnomusicologist, is currently an Honorary Senior Research Fellow working with the John Blacking Collection at the Callaway Centre, UWA.

In this talk, Jennifer will explore the way saved sounds, objects and images hold stories and conjure memories of music-making through their social and ecological history.

Jennifer will share musical stories and examples from exhibitions incorporating music from Western Arnhem Land and Southern Eastern Africa.

PUBLIC PROGRAM: This FREE event is part of the Berndt Museum public program accompanying the current exhibition (Little Painting, Big Stories) at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery. For similar events visit the website: http://www.lwgallery.uwa.edu.au/publicprogram

PARTNERSHIPS: The Campus Partner for this exhibition is the Graduate School of Education

I came to Australia in 1990 to work with Professor D. Siddle in the School of Psychology, University of Queensland on a postdoctoral research scholarship from the German Research Council. In 1994, I joined the academic staff in the School of Psychology, teaching in the areas of Human Associative Learning, Psychophysiology, and Behavioural Neuroscience. My research, both basic and applied, is concerned with emotion, attention and their interaction. In particular, it is concerned with the processes involved in the acquisition of likes and dislikes and with the manner in which emotionally salient events, such as facial expressions of emotion, are processed. I have published over 100 papers in peer reviewed, internationally recognised Journals and obtained more than $3M in competitive grants. In 2007, I was awarded an Australian Professorial Fellowship funded by the ARC and led a successful bid for an ARC Special Research Initiative in 2013. I am Editor of Biological Psychology and a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences in Australia, the Australian Psychological Society, and the Association for Psychological Science.

ABSTRACT: Facial expressions of emotion are among the most salient social signals used to communicate our current emotional state – they indicate whether it is safe to approach or to stay away. Hence it comes as little surprise that the manner in which facial expressions are processed has garnered considerable research interest in recent years. My interest in face processing was stimulated by reports of delayed extinction of fear conditioned to faces expressing anger and to other facial cues such as ethnicity – and I will present some of our work on the topic. A second line of research, motivated by this work, investigates the manner in which face cues of sex, age or race interact with facial expressions of emotion. This work suggests that processing of emotional expressions is highly flexible and affected by a number of factors, relating to these other cues present on an emotional face or to the context in which the expressions are presented.

Your resume needs to stand out from the crowd and get you to the interview stage. This workshop provides you with the most important points about developing the content and structuring your document.

R is a free and extremely powerful language and software environment for statistical computing, data analysis, and graphics. The course is designed for those who have no experience with R, but have a basic understanding of statistics. The course will include: Introduction to R: How to install R on your computer; basic R commands, how to use and understand the R help pages. Data: Reading in data and data manipulation; summarising data; basic statistical analysis and fitting linear models. Graphics and output: Basic plotting commands and how to customise your plots; how to export your plots and output in a user-friendly format. Functions: Writing simple functions and flow control structures.

The course will cover material ranging from a review of simple one-way ANOVA, to more complex designs and analyses including crossed and nested factors with fixed and random effects.The emphasis throughout will be placed on applications rather than theory. The statistical package R and R Commander will be used and some familiarity with this will be assumed.

In Australia over the last five years, the Federal Government has thrust a policy couplet of ‘quality’ and ‘equity’ to the forefront of education agendas in both schooling and higher education sectors. This couplet reflects and refracts dominant education discourses around the globe. The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has played a significant role in forging these educational priorities for a global knowledge era, and at the same time contributed to heightened competition between countries as they strive for ‘world class’ education systems and institutions. The Australian Federal Government has taken the approach of increasing central control of education in order to enhance both quality and equity, and hence Australia’s competitive positioning in the global arena. But educational quality and equity are amorphous ‘chameleon’ concepts; what are they, how do we measure them and are they comfortable bedfellows? Together, they might be described in terms of a Gordian knot; that is, they have become inextricably interlinked and they potentially create intractable problems. This presentation begins to untie the Gordian knot of quality and equity in education and asks if increasing central government control is the best solution to the policy problem. In so doing, it draws on concepts of ‘policy pandemics’, international ‘policy learning’ and ‘glocalisation’ to emphasise the importance of critical analysis of education trends from global to local levels in an emerging global knowledge society.

While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker´s arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here I discuss how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. I describe how specific impairments and individual differences in voice perception could relate to specific brain correlates. Finally, I consider that voices are produced by speakers who are often visible during communication, and present evidence that shows how speaker perception involves dynamic face-voice integration. Overall, the representation of para- and extralinguistic vocal information plays a major role in person perception and social communication, could be neuronally encoded in a prototype-referenced manner, and is subject to flexible adaptive recalibration as a result of specific perceptual experience.

Biography: Stefan Schweinberger is a full professor at the University of Jena in Germany. He is chair for General Psychology and head of the DFG-funded Person Perception Research Unit. Stefan received his Ph.D. and Habilitation from the University of Konstanz and was professor at the University of Glasgow before moving to Jena. His research interests include the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, particularly the electrophysiological correlates of face and voice perception.

While humans use their voice mainly for communicating information about the world, paralinguistic cues in the voice signal convey rich dynamic information about a speaker´s arousal and emotional state, and extralinguistic cues reflect more stable speaker characteristics including identity, biological sex and social gender, socioeconomic or regional background, and age. Here I discuss how recent methodological progress in voice morphing and voice synthesis has promoted research on current theoretical issues, such as how voices are mentally represented in the human brain. Special attention is dedicated to the distinction between the recognition of familiar and unfamiliar speakers, in everyday situations or in the forensic context, and on the processes and representational changes that accompany the learning of new voices. I describe how specific impairments and individual differences in voice perception could relate to specific brain correlates. Finally, I consider that voices are produced by speakers who are often visible during communication, and present evidence that shows how speaker perception involves dynamic face-voice integration. Overall, the representation of para- and extralinguistic vocal information plays a major role in person perception and social communication, could be neuronally encoded in a prototype-referenced manner, and is subject to flexible adaptive recalibration as a result of specific perceptual experience.

Biography: Stefan Schweinberger is a full professor at the University of Jena in Germany. He is chair for General Psychology and head of the DFG-funded Person Perception Research Unit. Stefan received his Ph.D. and Habilitation from the University of Konstanz and was professor at the University of Glasgow before moving to Jena. His research interests include the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying person perception, particularly the electrophysiological correlates of face and voice perception.