Dr Dan Bennett and Associate Professor Jacqueline Anderson

Welcome to the MSPS Colloquium with Dr Daniel Bennett and Associate Professor Jacqueline Anderson

Concussion recovery in community-based adults: Factors contributing to outcome after mild traumatic brain injury

Approximately 160,000 individuals will have a mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI)/concussion each year in Australia. Although the vast majority of these individuals will be among community-based civilians rather than professional sports people or military veterans, there is very limited research examining outcome for this group. In contrast to athletes and military veterans, at least 20% of community-based civilian adults who suffer an mTBI report ongoing symptoms for at least 12 months post-injury. This leads to impaired return to work/study and ongoing utilisation of health services. While it is well understood that psychological distress and a psychiatric history are risk factors for ongoing symptom reporting, these variables explain only a minority of variance in outcome. This talk will discuss some recent research findings that have identified a range of factors that contribute to poor outcome after mTBI, including both injury-related and individual-related factors.

About Associate Professor Jacqueline Anderson

Dr Jacqueline Anderson is an Associate Professor in Clinical Neuropsychology in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. Her research interests primarily relate to outcome after mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) and she currently leads a multi-disciplinary investigation examining factors contributing to long-term outcome after mTBI. She also leads a study that is investigating a novel treatment program for individuals who have not recovered within the typical timeframe after mTBI. A/Prof Anderson also holds an honorary position as Senior Clinical Neuropsychologist at The Alfred hospital.

Take the money and run: dissecting the ‘instant cash out’ feature of online sports betting

In recent years, the advent of smartphone and internet gambling has dramatically changed the gambling products that are available to consumers. Present-day gambling involves decisions that are far more dynamic and immersive than the static and slow-paced gambling decisions traditionally studied in cognitive psychology. Here I will talk about some recent work studying instant cash-out, an online gambling feature that allows users to cancel their bets during an event and receive an immediate payout. I will suggest that instant cash-out is both a contributing factor to gambling-related harm in the community and a novel risky choice problem worthy of empirical study in its own right.

About Dr Daniel Bennett

Dr Daniel Bennett is a Senior Lecturer in the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences. His research group studies human reinforcement learning and decision making, with a particular focus on understanding decision making in contemporary gambling products such as sports-betting apps and slot machines. Daniel completed his PhD within MSPS in 2017, and then re-joined late last year after spending some time at Princeton University and Monash University in the interim.

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