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.
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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).
Title:
Abstract:.
March 6 — Rebecca Saxe (Psychology, MIT).