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In this lecture Dr. Catherine Hartley, Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University, will discuss the evidence from animal research on environmental enrichment that suggests a variety of fresh experiences help people feel good about themselves.
Event details of Affective benefits of experiential diversity (on-site)
Date
13 December 2023
Time
16:00 -17:00

Title

Affective benefits of experiential diversity

Abstract

Given that humans live in complex and dynamic contexts, how much people explore their surroundings may have an impact on their exposure to new and varied experiences. In this talk, Dr. Catherine Hartley will present recent work in which we used longitudinal geolocation tracking and affective experience sampling to examine the relation between day-to-day variability in physical location ("roaming entropy") and fluctuations in positive affect.

Dr. Catherine Hartley will present findings demonstrating that increases in daily roaming entropy are associated with greater positive affect, that this effect is associated with functional connectivity within a hippocampal-striatal circuit, and that mean levels of roaming entropy increase across adolescence. She will discuss how this work may relate to theoretical models of depression, a disorder associated with both behavioral inertia and reductions in positive affect.

About dr. Catherine Hartley 

Dr. Catherine Hartley is an Associate Professor of Psychology and Neural Science at New York University. She received her B.S. in Symbolic Systems from Stanford University and her PhD in Psychology from New York University. She conducted her postdoctoral training at the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology at Weill Cornell Medicine. Dr. Hartley’s research focuses on characterizing the learning, memory, and decision-making processes that support goal-directed behavior across development, and how dynamic changes in brain circuits give rise to these functions.

A central goal of her research is to understand the adaptive benefits of how individuals learn and make decisions at different developmental stages, as well as how specific learning and decision-making biases contribute to psychological vulnerability or resilience.

Program

16:00 Presentation 
16:30 Q&A from the audience