Cognitive Science Colloquium
Spring 2025
All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in HJ Patterson Building (HJP) room 2124, unless otherwise indicated.
Note: some links may require you to open a new tab.
February 6 — Anna Papafragou (Psychology, Penn).
Title: How the human mind represents
events
Abstract: Humans are surprisingly adept at interpreting what is
happening around them, even from a single glance. Beginning at infancy, we are
able to recognize dynamic events, the roles that various entities play in these
events and the temporal and causal components that make up events. Furthermore,
we use language to describe the events that we experience. But what, exactly,
is an event? In this talk, I propose a theory of eventhood that combines
insights from logico-philosophical analysis, cognitive psychology and
linguistic theory, and thus places the nature of events at the heart of modern
cognitive science. On this theory, the representational units of events in
cognition rely on abstract underlying structure, including temporal boundaries.
In that sense, events are similar to objects (since objects also involve
abstract structure, including spatial boundaries). This proposal predicts
systematic patterns in the way people spontaneously perceive unfolding events.
It also explains otherwise mysterious similarities in how events and objects
behave as cognitive entities. Finally, this proposal naturally accounts for the
existence of a homology between the cognitive and linguistic structure of
events. This framework opens up exciting possibilities for future research on
how people represent, remember and talk about what happens.
February
20 — Andrew Begel (Computer Science, Carnegie
Mellon). POSTPONED
Title: Facilitating Shared Awareness in Mixed Sensory Ability Collaborative Software Development.
Abstract: Remote software development increases
the need for tightly-coupled synchronous collaboration due to the high
coordination overhead required by existing tools and practices. For example, it
is difficult to easily determine what your collaborator is looking at. This
impedes a pair’s ability to communicate efficiently and collaborate
effectively, compromising their agency and limiting their contribution. In a
set of two studies, we explored novel technical solutions to ease the
coordination burden felt between sighted remote pair programmers and between
sighted and blind and visually impaired (BVI) development pairs. For the
former, we designed a novel gaze visualization which shows where in the code
their partner is currently looking, and changes color when they both look at
the same reference. For the latter, we conveyed sighted partners’ navigation
and edit actions to the BVI partner via sound effects and speech. We evaluated
both designs with mixed sensory ability teams in within-subjects experiments
focusing on code refactoring tasks. Our results show that both solutions
streamline the dialogue required to refer to locations in the shared workspace,
enabling partners to spend more time contributing to coding tasks. Both
solutions enabled pairs to spend a greater proportion of time concurrently
looking at the same code locations. Pairs communicated using a larger ratio of
implicit to explicit linguistic references, and were faster and more successful
at responding to those references. Our designs offer paths towards enabling
remote and mixed sensory ability development teams to collaborate on more equal
terms.
March 6 — Rebecca Saxe (Psychology, MIT).