Cognitive Science Colloquium
Spring 2024
All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in HJ Patterson Building (HJP) room 2124, unless otherwise indicated.
February 1— Christopher Krupenye (Psychological & Brain Sciences, Johns Hopkins).
Title:
The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apess
Abstract: The social world is extremely dynamic and awash
with uncertainty. Yet, most of the time humans manage to navigate it fluidly.
What sorts of cognitive representations do we generate to parse the social
world, adeptly track social information, predict others’ behavior, and make
strategic decisions? What is it about the way that humans do this, that makes
us unique? Our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, provide a powerful
opportunity to investigate how minds very similar to our own (and to our common
evolutionary ancestors) represent and navigate the world—in the absence of
patterning by human culture and language. Through comparisons between humans
and other apes, I explore the foundational cognitive mechanisms, and underlying
representations, that shape human social life. In doing so, I also spotlight
those components that uniquely define our species. This approach helps
elucidate the cognitive underpinnings and evolutionary origins of human
sociality, ranging from politics to morality. At the same time, it bears on
broader questions that unite the cognitive sciences, concerning the origins of
knowledge and the functioning of the human mind.
February 15— Tania Lombrozo (Psychology, Princeton).
[use: open link in new tab]
Title: Believing beyond the evidence
Abstract:
The mathematician and
philosopher W.K. Clifford famously wrote that “…it is wrong always, everywhere,
and for anyone to believe anything on insufficient evidence.” While Clifford
intended this as a normative stricture, it raises a question about human
psychology: to what extent do people hold the beliefs of others to this
standard? To what extent do people obey it in forming and evaluating their own
beliefs? In this talk I'll present recent work from my lab investigating the
extent to which people believe beyond the evidence, and moreover think they
*should* believe beyond the evidence. Such cases seem to arise predominantly
when moral considerations favor a belief for which the evidence is insufficient
or even inconsistent - such as giving a friend the benefit of the doubt (out of
loyalty) when evidence suggests they may be to blame, or believing in God in
part because this belief is taken to have positive moral value.
February 29— Tal Linzen (Linguistics & Data Science, NYU).