Cognitive Science Colloquium
Fall 2018
All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in Bioscience Research Building 1103, unless otherwise indicated.
September 6 Barbara Sarnecka (Cognitive Sciences, UC Irvine).
Title: Numbers and Language
Abstract: After 20 years of studying the relation between language and the mental representation of numbers, Ive come to the conclusion that three things are true. (1) Numbers are unrelated to language; (2) Numbers are related to language in general; and (3) Numbers are related to particular languages. These sound like contradictory statements, but I will explain during my talk how all of them can be true, depending on what one means by language and what one means by number.
September 20 Sandra Trehub (Psychology, University of Toronto).
Title: The Musical Infant
Abstract: Despite infants
immature resolution of pitch and timing, they are surprisingly proficient at
holistic processing of pitch and timing patterns. Like adults, they recognize
the invariance of melodies across pitch levels and the invariance of rhythmic
patterns across tempos. They also exhibit long-term memory for melodies, and
their memory is especially detailed and enduring for vocal melodies. In some
respects, they are more flexible music listeners and learners than their adult
counterparts. Although adults musical engagement is commonly unimodal and
solitary, infants typically experience music multimodally
in dyadic contexts (e.g., Western caregivers sing lively play songs in
face-to-face contexts; non-Western caregivers sing soothing lullabies to
carried infants). Such singing is more effective than infant-directed speech in
regulating infant arousal and affect. Moreover, caregivers songs have social
as well as emotional significance for infants, influencing their behavior
toward unfamiliar individuals who sing such songs.
October 4 Mina Cikara (Psychology, Harvard University).
Title: Leveraging Choice Architecture to Alter Social Preferences
Abstract: Stereotypes and associated emotions drive discriminatory behavior across numerous consequential contexts. These biases against marginalized social groups have important implications for real-world social decisions, including hiring, voting, health, and housing decisions. Psychologists have traditionally studied how people evaluate different ethnic and cultural groups (and their members) in isolation, but in the real world people commonly make judgments and decisions over sets of people. For example, hiring decisions involve the assessment of multiple candidates at once. Across a series of experiments, we harness insights from computational models of decision-making to examine whether choice set constructionor choice architecturecan be used to influence decision-makers' preferences in consequential social decisions. I will review several findings including a combination of field data and lab experiments to examine the effect of alternatives, or decoys, on social evaluations and decisions in hiring and election contexts.
October 18 Percival Matthews (Educational Psychology, University of WisconsinMadison).
Title: Rational Feeling: Perceptual foundations for understanding numerical magnitudes
Abstract: Some contemporary theories of numerical cognition posit that a generalized magnitude system may serve as a core primitive foundation for building number concepts. To date, however, these theories have largely privileged whole numbers and whole number analogs, relegating rational numbers to the background. In this talk, I will argue that more explicit attention to nonsymbolic ratio perception can account for the deep connections between whole numbers and other classes of number, while accounting for how continuous magnitudes can be mapped to specific numbers. By carving out a pivotal role for nonsymbolic ratio perception, this correction might help provide the basis for a more unified theory of numerical cognition.
October 25 Darko Odic (Psychology,
University of British Columbia).
Title: Breaking the ATOM: Exploring the relationship
between number, time, and space perception
Abstract: Prominent theories in
cognitive and developmental psychology have posited that our perceptual sense
of number, time, and space form a singular, domain-general representation. In
this talk, I provide extensive evidence to suggest that these perceptual
representations are distinct: children and adults show no correlations between
number, area, density, time, etc., when domain-general factors such as working
memory, response conflicts, and general developmental improvements are
controlled for, saccadic trajectories show unique encoding algorithms for
number vs. area, and individual differences in number perception uniquely
predict formal mathematical abilities. But, critically, number, space, and time
share a common representational format of noisy Gaussian tuning curves on
independent scales, allowing for interactions between them in specific
contexts: reasoning about perceptual confidence and learning to map number
words to length and area. This independent-representational but shared-format
view allows us to reconcile some traditional findings in the perceptual
magnitudes literature while preserving the view of domain-specificity in the
perception of number, time, and space.
November 29 Emmanuel
Dupoux (LEcole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris).
Title: Can AI help the study of language development (and vice
versa)?
Abstract: The recent advances in artificial
intelligence (AI) rely on statistical learning techniques applied to large sets
of data. In this presentation, we show that AI can also have a scientific
impact in (neuro)cognitive sciences, by offering quantitative models of human
learning. We examine the case of cognitive and linguistic development in
children and show that, here, the relevant algorithms are essentially
unsupervised or weakly supervised (i.e. rely mainly on ambiguous and ambiguous
sensory data). We illustrate this type of algorithm with the automatic
discovery of linguistic units in an unknown language. We discuss the
feasibility of this approach and its ability to generate new hypotheses about
child learning processes, as well as the functional role of parent / child
interactions.
December 6 Kevin Ochsner (Psychology, Columbia University). POSTPONED to April 4, 2019.
Title:
Abstract: