Tuesday, December 2, 2025
12:10pm-1:30pm
MC 331
5 King's College Road
Speaker: Dr. Cendri Hutcherson, Professor, University of Toronto, Department of Psychology
Location: MC331 (Mechanical Engineering Building, 5 King’s College Road, Room 331)
Title: New approaches to explaining and predicting daily fluctuations in productivity: the good, the bad, and the ugly
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
https://shulab.mie.utoronto.ca/events/psycheng-seminar-registration-2025-dec-2-dr-cendri-hutcherson
Abstract: People sometimes succeed, and often fail, to accomplish what they set out to do, with tremendous variability observed both across individuals, and within individuals over time. Here, I discuss a number of lines of work from my lab trying to understand what predicts the daily “intention-behaviour gap” (i.e., the difference between what we want to do and what we actually achieve). First, I will discuss work we have done using computational modeling of daily performance on cognitive psychology tasks to understand and predict daily fluctuations in productivity. Second, I will describe machine learning approaches to predicting the daily intention-behaviour gap from passive digital trace data (e.g., mobile phone usage patterns). Although there are a number of exciting potential applications of this work, which I will highlight, our results also reveal important limitations on what we may and may not be able to achieve. I will conclude with a broader discussion of the feasibility not only of predicting goal achievement within and across individuals, but also of strategies we might then use for actually helping people to do better, one day at a time.
Biography:
Cendri Hutcherson is the director of the Decision Neuroscience Laboratory, an Associate Professor of Psychology at the University
of Toronto, and Canada Research Chair Tier II in Decision Neuroscience. She received degrees in psychology from Harvard (B.A.)
and Stanford(Ph.D.), and spent several years as a post-doctoral scholar studying neuroeconomics at the California Institute of Technology.
Her research focuses on understanding why we make the decisions we do, why we so often make decisions we regret, and how we can
help people to make better choices for themselves and others. She loves the deep philosophical implications of neuroscience and psychology, and also
the pretty brain pictures.
To help us plan, please register at the below link:
PsychEng Seminar Registration: 2025 Dec 2: Dr. Cendri Hutcherson