Cognitive Science Colloquium
Spring 2017
All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in Bioscience Research Building 1103, unless otherwise noted.
February 2 Jennifer Lerner (Public Policy & Management, Harvard)
Title: Portrait of the angry decision maker
Abstract: Drawing on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (Lerner & Keltner, 2000; 2001), I will present a series of studies from my lab revealing that incidental anger systematically biases judgment and decision making by heightening perceptions of controllability and certainty, decreasing perceptions of risk, and increasing risk taking. I then will present a series of studies (also from my lab) revealing the ways in which such superficially biased responses prove to be both biologically adaptive and financially lucrative, especially for males. Taken together, the studies make clear that simple conclusions about the role of emotion in rationality obfuscate complex patterns of human behavior. Angry decision makers exhibit a predictable pattern of responses but the normative consequences of such responses hinge on specific situational contingencies.
Note: the visit of Roger Levy (Brain & Cognitive Sciences, MIT), originally scheduled for Feb 16, is deferred to the 2017-18 academic year
February 23 Sabine Kastner (Neuroscience, Princeton) Note: in BPS 1140B.
Title: Neural dynamics of the primate attention network
Abstract: The selection of information
from our cluttered sensory environments is one of the most fundamental
cognitive operations performed by the primate brain. In the visual domain, the
selection process is thought to be mediated by a static spatial mechanism a
spotlight that can be flexibly shifted around the visual scene. This spatial
search mechanism has been associated with a large-scale network that consists
of multiple nodes distributed across all major cortical lobes and includes also
subcortical regions. To identify the specific functions of each network
node and their functional interactions is a major goal for the field of
cognitive neuroscience. In my lecture, I will challenge two common
notions of attention research. First, I will show behavioral and neural
evidence that the attentional spotlight is neither stationary nor unitary. In
the appropriate behavioral context, even when spatial attention is sustained at
a given location, additional spatial mechanisms operate flexibly in parallel to
monitor the visual environment. Second, spatial attention is assumed to be
under top-down control of higher order cortex. In contrast, I will provide
neural evidence indicating that attentional control is exerted through thalamo-cortical interactions. Together, this
evidence indicates the need for major revisions of traditional attention
accounts.
March 9 Jessica Sommerville (Psychology, University of Washington)
Title:
The virtuous baby? The limits and limitations of infants socio-moral cognition
and behavior.
Abstract: Recently, twin narratives have arisen in both the scholarly
literature and in the popular press that depict infants as a. moral judges and
b. inherently altruistic. Each of these narratives has a set of corollaries or
associated claims: that moral knowledge is built in, thorough, and relatively
impervious to experience, and that infants moral behavior is unlearned,
virtuously motivated, prolific and indiscriminate. In my talk, I will examine
these narratives and claims in the context of my laboratorys research on
infants sensitivity to distributive fairness norms and infants prosocial
behavior. Our results contextualize and temper these narratives and claims. First,
infants socio-moral knowledge emerges over the course of development, is
marked by individual differences, and may lack some components of a mature
moral response. Second, infants prosocial behavior is influenced by
experience, and impacted by variables that affect the personal costs and
interpersonal benefits of acting prosocially.
Together, these findings reveal the limits and limitations of infants
socio-moral cognition and behavior.
March 16 Clement Canonne (CNRS, Paris)
Title: The Cognition of Collective Improvisation
Abstract: Most
studies in the field of music cognition treat music as an abstract sonic
structure, a sound text that is received, analyzed for syntax and form, and
eventually decoded for content and expression. However, music is also something
that people do, and often something
that people do together, a creative
activity whose meaning is generated in real-time as a result of the
interactions between a series of agents. This collective dimension of
music-making is perhaps most obvious in improvised music, such as jazz or free
jazz. In this talk, I will thus present several studies centered on collective
free improvisation in order to better understand: how musicians manage to coordinate
their actions and create music together when common knowledge between them
is minimal; and how attending to music as collectively produced affect our
listening experience.
March 30 Russell Poldrack (Psychology, Stanford)
Title:
The future of fMRI in cognitive neuroscience
Abstract: Cognitive neuroscience has witnessed two decades of rapid
growth, thanks in large part to the continued development of fMRI methods.
In my talk, I will question what this work has told us about brain
function, and will propose some new directions that I see as being crucial to
the ultimate success of cognitive neuroscience. First, I will discuss the need
for approaches that allow selective associations between mental operations and
representations and brain activity. Related to this, I will discuss the
need to develop and test formal ontologies of cognitive processes.
Finally, I will discuss the need to make research practices in
neuroimaging more reproducible.
April
13 Sarah Shomstein
(Psychology, George Washington University)
Title: Hidden in Plain Sight: Intrusive Effects of Task-Irrelevant
Representations on Attention
Abstract: Attention is a cognitive process by which a subset of sensory
information is selected for further, more detailed, processing. The study
of attentional selection is often framed in terms of task relevant information,
selected in accordance with the current goal of the organism, thought to be subserved by a large-scale network panning the frontal and
parietal cortex. In my talk, I will challenge the notion that only task
relevant information constrains attentional allocation. First, I will show that
task-irrelevant information, both the intermediate (object) and high-level
(semantic) representations, influence attentional allocation. I will then
demonstrate a mechanism by which task-irrelevant information influences
selection via interactions between the posterior parietal and early visual
cortices. I will conclude by proposing a novel approach suggesting that
attention is a flexible mechanism that acts to reduce uncertainty present in
the sensory environment. Evidence for this argument will be drawn from a set of
behavioral, eye-tracking, and neuroimaging experiments. Taken together, I will
argue that traditional accounts of attentional selection need to be revised to
incorporate intrusive effects of task-irrelevant sensory stimuli.
April 20 Paul Harris (Education, Harvard)
Title:
I dont know: Ignorance and question-asking as engines for cognitive
development
Abstract: In highlighting young childrens receptivity to, and appraisal
of, potential informants, recent research on childrens early cultural learning
has neglected their self-appraisals and their concomitant information seeking.
Recent evidence shows that human toddlers spontaneously signal their own
cognitive states; they use non-verbal gestures (e.g., a shoulder shrug and/or
flipping of the palms upward and outward) together with explicit statements (I
dont know) to convey their ignorance. They also explicitly affirm what they
know (I know
) and query the knowledge of an interlocutor (Do you know
?).
Alongside such self-monitoring, toddlers also display an interrogative stance
toward potential informants. They ask for information via pointing, via simple
factual questions, and via explanation-seeking questions. Granted that children
are likely to vary considerably in the responses they receive to such
information seeking, they are likely to arrive at different assessments of the
scope of human knowledge, the magnitude of their own comparative ignorance, and
the potential role of question-asking in mitigating such ignorance.
May 4 Ladan Shams (Psychology, UCLA) cancelled
Title: tba
Abstract: tba