Dr Elise Rowe and Dr Oliver Sng
Lowe Theatre, L1, Redmond Barry Building, Parkville VIC 3052
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The August 2026 MSPS Colloquium was presented by Dr Elise Rowe and visiting academic Dr Oliver Sng.
Event recording
Perception and prediction in psychosis: Preliminary laminar fMRI findings from the hollow-mask Illusion
Psychotic disorders are severe mental health conditions that are marked by disruptions to perception and disconnection from reality. While neurotypical individuals integrate sensory information (likelihood) and prior expectations when forming perceptions – it is theorised that individuals with psychosis show alterations to these processes. However, the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are still poorly understood.
To address this, our ‘PRIOR’ study examines perceptual processing across the psychosis spectrum using advances in neuroimaging including ultra high-resolution layer fMRI at 7T and optically-pumped magnetoencephalography (OPM-MEG). We aim to recruit four groups of N=30: individuals at-risk of developing psychosis (UHR), those who have experienced a first episode of psychosis (FEP), people with chronic psychotic illness within the schizophrenia spectrum (SZ) and neurotypical individuals (NT).
Each participant completes: (1) a behavioural ‘coin-task’ examining how prior and likelihood information are combined, (2) the ‘hollow-mask illusion’ during layer fMRI examining the neural encoding of prior expectations across cortical layers and (3) an auditory ‘volatility mismatch negativity’ paradigm during OPM-MEG recordings examining whether (prior) expectation violations manifest as brain connectivity alterations.
Elise will present preliminary findings from the first year of recruitment in their laminar fMRI study investigating the rotating hollow-mask illusion.
About Dr Elise Rowe
Dr Elise Rowe is a Research Fellow within the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research focuses on perception, predictive coding, conscious awareness, and mental health. She is currently using advanced neuroimaging techniques, including OPM-MEG and layer fMRI, to investigate the neurobiological mechanisms underlying perceptual changes in psychosis. Her previous work has employed EEG, fMRI and diffusion MRI to study the pathways involved visual processes such as motion perception and spatial attention. Overall, her research aims to better understand the neural pathways involved in generating our perception of the world.
The Ecology of Relatedness: How living around family (or not) matters
How does living in an environment with many (or few) family relatives shape our psychology?
Dr Oliver Sng draws upon ideas from behavioural ecology to explore the psychological effects of a relatively unexamined ecological dimension: the prevalence of kin in one’s group. To the extent that our species has experienced lifetime variation in the prevalence of one’s kin, evolution should have selected for psychological flexibilities that are sensitive to this, and that shift behaviour in predictable ways.
Across studies, we find that people who live in, or who imagine living in, ecologies where they are surrounded by more family relatives tend to (1) hold more interdependent self-construals/perceive themselves as more connected to others around them, (2) be more willing to fight for their group even at a risk to themselves, and (3) be more punitive of others who engage in highly antisocial behaviours.
This work connects ideas from non-human animal behaviour to human social behaviour, holds implications for understanding the origins of cultural differences, and highlights the utility of thinking about the ecology of kin.
About Dr Oliver Sng
Oliver Sng is currently Assistant Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Irvine. He received his PhD in Social Psychology from Arizona State University and was previously also a research fellow at the University of Michigan. His work applies an evolutionary lens to thinking about human social behaviour, with a focus on understanding the origins of cultural psychological variation and social stereotypes. His research has been published in Psychological Review, PNAS, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and Evolution and Human Behavior. He leads the Evolution, Culture, and Stereotyping Lab at UC Irvine. He is also recipient of SPSP's Wegner Theoretical Innovation Award, the APS Rising Star Award and elected fellow of SESP.