Cognitive Science Colloquium

Fall 2025

All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in HJ Patterson Building (HJP) room 2124, unless otherwise noted.

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Sept 11 — Susan Goldin-Meadow (Psychology, University of Chicago).

Title: The Mind Hidden in Our Hands
Abstract: Gesture is versatile in form and function.  Under certain circumstances, gesture can substitute for speech, and when it does, it embodies the properties of language that children themselves bring to language learning, and underscores the resilience of language itself. Under other circumstances, gesture can form a fully integrated system with speech.  When it does, it both predicts and promotes learning, and underscores the resilience of gesture in thinking. Together, these lines of research show how much of our minds is hidden in our hands.

Sept 25 — Alexander Todorov (Booth School of Business, Chicago).

Title: Modeling subjective visual evaluations

Abstract: People effortlessly and spontaneously evaluate stimuli in their environment. There are two challenges understanding these evaluations. The first challenge is that reducing a complex evaluation (e.g., “beautiful”) to the physical description of the stimulus is far from trivial, because the space of hypotheses of what perceptual features drive evaluations is infinitely large. My research group has developed data-driven computational methods that allow us to find a consistent mapping from features to evaluations. Although the original methods were developed for face evaluation, modern machine learning methods extend the approach to modeling evaluations of any visual category. The second challenge is that evaluations are highly idiosyncratic. In fact, statistical modeling shows that stable idiosyncratic preferences account for most of the variance of complex evaluations (e.g., more than 80% in the case of “trustworthiness”). These findings suggest that the mapping from features to evaluations is highly heterogeneous across people. Yet almost all existing models of evaluations are models of aggregated judgments, assuming consistent mapping across people and, essentially, masking idiosyncratic differences. I describe one approach of building models of evaluations of individual participants. The models are meaningful and reveal the diversity of human preferences.

 

Oct 9 — Laura Schulz (Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT).

 

               Title:  Problems of our own making: Exploration, insight, and identity.

               Abstract: Work on exploration is closely tied to work on rational learning. Researchers have proposed that humans are motivated to explore variously in the face of novelty, prediction error, information gaps, opportunities for information gain, uncertainty reduction, anticipatory utility, increased empowerment, and increased rates of learning progress. Although there are important distinctions among these accounts, they are united by the idea that organisms are motivated to build more accurate models of themselves and the world. I’ve long worked in the tradition of exploratory play as rational learning and I will present some of this work. However, I will also suggest that we should take an expansive view of the kind of behavior that exploration permits. Human motivation is vastly flexible: We can want to think about and explore anything, whether or not it has any apparent social, epistemic, or instrumental value. Indeed, much of what children (and adults) do involves inventing problems we don’t (otherwise) have and incurring unnecessary costs to obtain seemingly arbitrary rewards. Second, motivation cannot be easily decoupled from cognition. I will present some new work suggesting that social goals can affect not just what we choose to think about but what we can think about. I end by speculating about the connection between cultural variability, division of labor, and distinctively human motivation.

 

Oct 16 — Paula Rubio-Fernández (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, NL).

 

Title: Common ground: Between formal pragmatics and psycholinguistics

Abstract: In a review paper forthcoming in the Annual Review of Linguistics, Rubio-Fernandez and Harris introduce cognitive pluralism as the idea that we have more than one solution to the problem of choosing and representing shared background information—or the problem of common ground. A cognitive-pluralist model of common ground should consider both the sources of variability in common ground use, as well as its processing demands. In this talk, I will first discuss both requirements in the context of psycholinguistic models of common ground. I will then take stock of the findings and conclusions of experimental studies of common ground, and explore future directions in line with cognitive pluralism. 

 

Oct 30 — Simone Dalla Bella (Psychology, University of Montreal).

 

Title: Playing with musical rhythm: New frontiers in therapeutic interventions

Abstract: Rhythm is a fundamental aspect of human behavior, shaping the way we walk, speak, and interact with others. It tightly links perception and action through general-purpose cortico-subcortical networks. Individual differences in rhythmic abilities can now be assessed with standardized tools such as the Battery for the Assessment of Auditory Sensorimotor and Timing Abilities (BAASTA), revealing distinct profiles across healthy and clinical populations. Importantly, rhythm processing is often disrupted in conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., ADHD, developmental dyslexia, developmental stuttering). In recent years, research has shown that rhythmic skills are not only central to everyday life but can also be harnessed to support health and well-being. Translational research demonstrates that targeted rhythmic training can enhance motor performance and executive functions, paving the way for novel therapeutic approaches. In this talk, I will show how gamified rhythm interventions, which engage multisensory processes, ensure high compliance, and have shown feasibility and preliminary efficacy in both neurodegenerative and neurodevelopmental disorders. These serious games selectively improve rhythmic skills and may generalize to broader cognitive functions. Together, this work outlines a promising frontier where rhythm-based, technology-supported interventions can support rehabilitation in clinical populations.

 

Nov 13 — John Trueswell (Psychology, U Penn).

 

Title: Tracking words and worlds: How distributional histories and referential evidence interact to shape language acquisition

Abstract: It is widely assumed that distributional learning – the ability to track how linguistic elements co-occur with each other – plays a key role in early language acquisition. At the level of words, tracking the distributional histories of word forms (that is, the statistical record of where and with which other words a given word appears) likely helps learners infer some of their grammatical and semantic properties. Another major source of information about word meaning comes from observing a word’s contingencies with the ambient referent world (e.g., by tracking word-referent mappings). Much less studied, however, is how these two early learning processes interact. To what extent do distributional histories guide or bias learners’ initial hypotheses about word–referent mappings? And conversely, to what extent does knowledge gained from successful word–referent mappings guide and bias subsequent distributional learning?  Addressing these questions is crucial for building an integrated account of early language acquisition. Although some prior research has explored these issues, most studies have done so by introducing a few novel lexical items into a learner’s existing natural language, which makes it difficult to isolate the underlying mechanisms. Here, we take a complementary approach using artificial language learning, which allows us to parametrically manipulate when and how different sources of evidence become available to a learner. This paradigm offers a controlled means of examining how distributional and referential learning jointly shape the earliest stages of word and grammar learning. In doing so, we’ve been able to identify some of the learning mechanisms underlying “semantic seeding” – how knowing the meanings of a small number of words enables learners to discover the semantic implications of distributional categories, thereby enriching their grammatical knowledge.

Dec 4 — Joseph Henrich (Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard).

Title:
Abstract: