Conference: The Normative Significance of Cognitive Science

Registration is now open for our forthcoming conference at St Hugh's College, University of Oxford, 17-18 July

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Taking heart disease medication can affect a person's subconscious attitudes towards race, Oxford University researchers have found.

27 February-Seminar: Two Lectures in Neuroethics

Prof. Neil  Levy

Resource depletion: the duration of impairment

Neil Levy is Deputy Director (Research) of the Oxford Centre for Neuroethics, and Head of Neuroethics at the Florey Neuroscience Institutes, University of Melbourne.

This talk reports recent experimental work on the depletion of the cognitive resources involved in self-control. Previous work used crude measures of depletion, which made it difficult to disentangle capacity and motivation to exercise self-control. We used better controlled tasks to measure depletion. We generated several novel results. First, we found that susceptibility to depletion is apparently dependent on cognitive ability. Second, we found (contrary to the claims of Baumeister) that recovery from depletion does not depend on rest or glucose. We also found that there was a cost in switching between types of operation on the depletion task, which predicted a significant proportion of the depletion on the performance task.

Dr. Molly Crockett

Towards a science of moral enhancement: insights from neuroscience and behavioral economics

Molly Crockett studies the neurobiology of morality and altruism, collaborating with economists at the University of Zürich and neuroscientists at University College London as a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellow.