Insight sessions by Rebecca Schaefer and Amandine Lerusse

Do you hear what I hear? – Rebecca Schaefer

Music is the language of emotions! But do we actually hear or feel the same things? Or does it perhaps depend on where your attention lies – what you hear, what moves you? The atmosphere or emotion of music can be experienced very differently by different people. In ‘Do you hear what I hear?’, we’ll discover just how different that can be through a live experiment! Scientist Rebecca Schaefer offers an insight into how your own listening experience plays a part in this, whilst violinist Merel Vercammen performs some extraordinary music; at the end of the performance, the results of the research will be revealed straight away.​

What Gets Attention in Public Decision-Making? – Amandine Lerusse

National and local politicians, as well as public managers at all levels of government, have access to an unprecedented amount of evidence and information to help address pressing societal challenges, from sustainability and artificial intelligence to growing social inequalities. Yet their ability to make use of this information is constrained by limited time, resources, and cognitive capacity. They cannot attend to every problem, piece of evidence, or potential solution. Instead, they must selectively allocate their attention across competing demands. In this presentation, I examine which characteristics of evidence attract and sustain politicians’ and public managers’ attention, and when this attention translates into policy prioritization. More broadly, I seek to understand the link between evidence, attention, and policy priorities: why some evidence cuts through competing demands for attention, and under what conditions it ultimately shapes which problems and solutions rise to the top of the policy agenda.