Dr Khandis Blake and Dr Sophie Lin

Welcome to the MSPS Colloquium with Dr Khandis Blake and Dr Sophie Lin

Exploring Psychological Patterns Across Time and Place Using 2.3 Billion Tweets: A Practical Workshop for Researchers

Understanding how psychological phenomena vary across time and space is a growing frontier across cognitive, social, clinical, and neuropsychological research. In this hands-on workshop, I introduce TwitPlat—a newly developed, open-access database containing more than 2.3 billion geolocated tweets spanning the past 10 years. The dataset includes coverage from every UN-recognised country, all global cities over 100,000 in population, and every U.S. city with over 5,000 residents. TwitPlat enables rich, high-resolution analysis of language use, sentiment, emotional expression, moral content, and behavioural signals, across ecological, socioeconomic, and institutional contexts. It supports investigations into cultural norms, regional differences in cognition and affect, temporal trends, and responses to collective events—offering a powerful tool for both hypothesis-driven and exploratory work. There is no other publicly available social media resource with this level of spatial precision, temporal depth, and accessibility. I will walk through how researchers can access and use the platform, with practical examples relevant across psychological subfields. Participants will leave with everything they need to begin using TwitPlat in their own work.

About Dr Khandis Blake

Dr Blake is an expert on sexual politics who combines insights from evolutionary biology, psychology and big data to understand conflict and competition among people. Her research addresses big issues that profoundly influence wellbeing, including personal agency and empowerment, intimate partner violence and the varied ways in which people seek and enact status. Dr Blake convenes TwitPlat, a database of 2.3 billion geolocated Twitter posts spanning 10 years, and the Daily Cycle Diary, an online citizen science platform that helps women to understand how their menstrual cycle affects their psychology. She is a Research Fellow and senior lecturer at the Melbourne School of Psychological Science at the University of Melbourne.

Optically Pumped Magnetometer MEG Study of Neural Dynamics in Human Eyeblink Conditioning.

The human cerebellum is smaller in volume than the cerebrum but contains over 70% of the brain’s neurons. Connected to many cortical regions, including the prefrontal cortex, it supports not only motor control but also cognitive and social functions. Despite this, studies of human cerebellar function using non-invasive electrophysiology have been limited, partly due to the misconception that it is inaccessible to magnetoencephalography (MEG) or EEG. In this study, likely the first such attempt, we used wearable optically pumped magnetometer-based magnetoencephalography (OP-MEG) to record cerebellar activity during eyeblink classical conditioning in healthy adults. OP-MEG reliably detected cerebellar responses to brief air-puff stimuli (unconditioned stimulus, US), which diminished over the course of conditioning - mirroring Purkinje cell activity changes reported in animal models. Additional cerebellar responses were observed just prior to the peak of the conditioned blink. Source localisation consistently placed these responses within the cerebellum. These results establish OP-MEG as a robust, non-invasive method for measuring human cerebellar electrophysiology. By aligning human recordings with invasive findings from animal studies, this approach opens new opportunities for investigating cerebellar mechanisms in learning, cognition, and neurological disease.

About Dr Sophie Lin

Sophie Lin’s research focuses on non-invasive brain imaging, particularly using optically pumped magnetometer-based magnetoencephalography (OP-MEG), to investigate cerebellar function in human learning and cognition. She has contributed to developing OP-MEG as a method for recording cerebellar activity in humans. Her work also explores predictive processing in both the cerebrum and cerebellum, as well as neural mechanisms underlying neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, aiming to inform treatments like brain-computer interfaces. Collaborating with MEG experts nationwide, Sophie played a key role in establishing Australia’s first whole-head OP-MEG system at the Melbourne School of Psychological Sciences at the University of Melbourne, which she currently manages.

Event Recording