Transcript faculty of psychology and educational sciences

FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY
AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES
Jury:
INTERNAL:
The Overlap Between Social Mentalizing and
Attentional Reorienting : The role of the temporoparietal junction
Prof. dr. Nathalie Pattyn (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, PE)
Prof. dr. Natacha Deroost (Vrije Universiteit Brussel, PE)
Public defense to obtain the degree of
DOCTOR OF PSYCHOLOGY
of
Ms. Ceylan Ozdem
EXTERNAL:
Dr. Tobias Schuwerk (Ludwig-Maximilians - University of Munich,
Germany)
which will take place on
Dr. Ralph Weidner (Forschungszentrum Jülich, Germany)
12th of December, 16:00
Promotiezaal, D2.01
Campus Etterbeek
How to reach the VUB: http://www.vub.ac.be/campus/brussels-humanities-sciencesengineering-campus
Pleinlaan 2 – 1050 Brussel
Please confirm your attendance before : 29/11/2016 via [email protected]
Promotors:
Prof. dr. Frank Van Overwalle (Vrije Universiteit Brussel)
Prof. dr. Marcel Brass (Ugent)
FACULTY OF PSYCHOLOGY
AND EDUCATIONAL SCIENCES
Summary
In our daily lives, it is almost inevitable not to interact with other people.
During these social interactions, we often exchange different points of
views about common events in our daily life. Sometimes we observe and
share the same scene physically, as when we watch a movie at the cinema.
Other times, we do not share the exact same physical events, as when we
recount the same New Year’s Eve party but talked with different friends.
Whether we share the same event or not, we can still empathize with other
persons due to our ability to take the perspective of others and imagine
their mental state, a process which is termed mentalizing .
Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that the temporo-parietal
junction (TPJ) is activated when unexpected stimuli appear in spatial
reorientation(attentional reorientation) tasks as well as during thinking
about the beliefs (mentalizing).
This thesis mainly focuses on the role of temporo-parietal junction (TPJ) in
the overlap between these two seemingly different processes: attentional
reorientation and mentalizing.
Curriculum Vitae
Ceylan Ozdem graduated from Ludwig-Maximilians - University of
Munich in Germany with a master degree in NeuroCognitive Psychology.
Shortly after, she started her PhD. at the Department of Experimental
and Applied Psychology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel.
During her Ph.D., she focused on mentalizing, attentional reorientation
and attributing to more than two mental states. Her first two studies
were published in an international journal entitled as Social
Neuroscience.
She participated in national and international conferences to present her
studies. In 2015, she was a visiting student at Princeton University in the
Social Neuroscience Lab under the supervision of Assistant Prof. Diana
Tamir.
She is also interested in group dynamics, biases and ir(rational) human
behaviors. In order to build a bridge between science and real life
applications, she did a project on how to debiase our decisions in a usercentred company in Brussels.