Dear Cognitive Folks,
The next Fluencia Party will be on 9th February (Friday) starting at 8.00pm
in Élesztő (Tűzoltó utca close to Corvin metro station).
Info: https://www.facebook.com/events/2013110232260580/
Fluencia is a monthly organized informal "jamboree" for cogsci-,
psychology-related students (undergrads, grads), professors, researchers
from many different universities in Hungary. The idea and motivation are to
facilitate interactions, communication, collaboration among researchers
working here, get to know others and others' interests, topics, etc. And,
of course, to have some drinks and fun in a friendly environment.
Everybody is welcome to attend! If you have any further questions, do not
hesitate to ask.
All the best,
Dezso
--------------------------------------
NEMETH, Dezso (PhD)
Brain, Memory and Language Lab: http://www.memory-and-language.com
Phone: +36-1-4614500/3565, +36-1-4614500/3519
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you to attend our event:
[cid:image003.jpg@01D516F8.36F19480]
Workshop: Alignment and Social Bonding
Time: Friday, 7th June, 9.30 - 14.00
Place: October Hall, October 6 utca 7, 1051 Budapest
Program:
9.30-10.30 Alignment at different levels during dialogue
Simon Garrod, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK
10.30-11.00 Coffee
11.00-12.00 How we connect: From shared attention to social networks
Thalia Wheatley, Center for Social Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, US
12.00-13.00 Lunch
13.00-14.00 Molecular imaging of the human social bonding circuit
Lauri Nummenmaa, Turku PET Centre, Finland
***************************************
Talk abstracts
Alignment at different levels during dialogue
(Simon Garrod<https://www.gla.ac.uk/researchinstitutes/neurosciencepsychology/staff/simon…>, Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology, University of Glasgow, UK)
Cooperative joint activities such as dialogue present a challenge for monadic cognitive science, because they involve more than one individual at the same time. This talk will present a non-monadic Shared Workspace framework for interpreting such activities and show how it applies to dialogue. The framework captures distributed properties of joint activities such as alignment of representations and synchronization.
Alignment in dialogue has two dimensions. The first concerns the content of the aligned representations which can be linguistic or based on dialogue models. Linguistic representations relate to the sound, meaning and grammar as well as the para linguistic features of utterances (e.g., gestures). Dialogue models are of two kinds. Interlocutors have a situation model representing what they are discussing and a game model representing their current dialogue game - the interactive device (e.g., question plus answer) used to achieve the current goal of the dialogue (e.g., seeking information from your partner).
The second dimension of alignment concerns time-scale which can be short-term (focal alignment) or long-term (global alignment). I will argue that global linguistic alignment is the residue of successive focal alignments based on 'automatic' priming mechanisms. Similarly, global alignment of situation models reflects successive focal alignments on situation models. And focal alignment of linguistic representations contributes to focal alignment of situation models.
The goal of dialogue as a cooperative joint activity is to achieve alignment in relation to the topic of discussion. Therefore, interlocutors monitor their joint contributions to the shared workspace for such alignment. In turn, they use the outcome of the monitoring to produce positive or negative commentaries which help to keep the dialogue on track.
How we connect: From shared attention to social networks
(Thalia Wheatley<https://pbs.dartmouth.edu/people/thalia-wheatley>, Center for Social Brain Sciences, Dartmouth College, US)
The human brain evolved to be massively interactive with its social environment. A deep understanding of human thought and behavior will therefore require research that incorporates the context of others. In this talk I will present behavioral and brain research from my lab that shows the utility of conversation to align people's mental models and how this alignment across brains predicts friendship and influence in real world social networks. I will also highlight recent advances in the field that are increasingly affording the study of how and why minds connect.
Molecular imaging of the human social bonding circuit
(Lauri Nummenmaa<http://emotion.utu.fi/people/>, Turku PET Centre, Finland)
The endogenous opioid and dopamine systems support appetitive, motivational, and social behaviour in humans and animals. In this talk I discuss our recent work on mapping the role of the μ-opioid receptor (MOR) and type 2 dopamine receptor system (D2R) systems in human social and emotional behaviour using fusion imaging with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and in vivo positron emission tomography (PET) with agonist radioligands [11C]carfentanil and [11c]raclopride selective for MORs and D2Rs, respectively. Both activation studies and cross-sectional work show that MORs are associated with sociability. Social grooming and social laughter modulate central opioidergic activity, and multiple aspects of prosociality measured by laboratory tasks and questionnaires are positively associated with MOR expression in the frontal cortex. Conversely, antisocial traits such as psychopathy are negatively associated with MOR expression in the limbic system. Finally, MOR (but not D2R) expression is associated with BOLD-fMRI responses during vicarious pain perception confirming the contribution of MOR system in empathy. Altogether these results suggest that particularly the opioid system plays a major role in in human reward processing and sociability. Central opioid release during social interaction may act as a safety signal, promoting establishment and maintenance of social relationships. Consequently, malfunction of the opioid system may predispose individuals to developing disorders involving abnormal hedonic and socioemotional processing.
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The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Communication as Joint Action: The role
of cognitive alignment and coupling
by
Adam Boncz
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gunther Knoblich (CEU)
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Thalia Wheatley (Dartmouth College)
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Gergely Csibra, Chair, CEU
Simon Garrod, external examiner, University of Glasgow, and
Lauri Nummenmaa, external examiner, University of Turku
abstract | Human communication is a multi-faceted phenomenon. Here we focused on communication in a joint action framework and aimed to answer three questions.
First, we asked if people communicate efficiently in helping situations where signals can have a direct effect on task performance. We tested this question in four
experiments using a precueing version of a reaction time task, where a helper participant's action provided a cue for a helpee participant. We found that helpers
communicated efficiently but helpees did not utilize helpers' signals as much as they could. While helpers traded their own effort for helpees' performance gain, helpees
avoided relying on helpers' communication, leading to a tension on the pair level. Second, we tested if alignment in verbal interactions is modulated by interactivity and
individual goals, contrasting predictions of the interactive alignment model and automatic imitation accounts. Interactivity and goal overlap were modulated in a joint
storytelling scenario and alignment was captured at multiple linguistic levels. We found independent effects of interactivity and individual goals: prosodic alignment (in
terms of temporal structure) was affected only by the goal manipulation, while syntactic, lexical and semantic alignment was mostly modulated by interactivity. Our
results suggest that interactivity increases high-level linguistic alignment, but prosodic alignment is unaffected by it. Third, we tested if interactivity elicits stronger
brain-to-brain coupling using an fMRI hyperscanning setup. Employing the joint storytelling task we found evidence for stronger predictive coupling in an interactive
condition relative to a non-interactive condition, potentially linked to temporal predictive processes. In sum, our work emphasizes the importance of studying
communication from a broad, integrative perspective and by employing a variety of techniques.
The defense will take place at Oktober 6 street 7, Room 101, on Thursday, June 6, at 2 pm
organized by the Department of Cognitive Science
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The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you to its talk by
Diana Mazzarella<https://www.unine.ch/islc/home/collaborateurs/professeurs/Diana%20Mazzarell…> (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland)
Date: Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 17:00-18:30
Location: CEU, Oktober 6. Street 7, room 101
The interface between pragmatics and epistemic vigilance
Speakers have two distinct goals: to be understood and to make the hearer think or act according to what is to be understood. As a result, when receiving a piece of incoming information, the hearer needs to interpret it (by inferring the speaker meaning based on linguistic and contextual cues) and evaluate it (by assessing the reliability of its source and the plausibility of its content). While the former task pertains to pragmatics, the latter is carried out by epistemic vigilance mechanisms (Sperber et al., 2010). In this talk, I will show that these two tasks are closely intertwined. I will make this case by focusing on two distinct phenomena: speaker commitment and irony comprehension.
Previous research has shown that speaker commitment increases the likelihood that a message is accepted as true (see, e.g., Vullioud et al., 2017). Committed speakers are judged as reliable informants as their commitment puts their reputation at stake. I will discuss the way in which the attribution of speaker commitment can be modulated by pragmatic cues and provide empirical evidence that speakers are taken to be less committed to what they implicate than to what they presuppose or assert.
Finally, I will focus on a specific pragmatic phenomenon, irony comprehension, and its relation with epistemic vigilance. Current accounts of irony all converge on the assumption that one of its defining features is the expression of a dissociative attitude towards the proposition literally expressed (see, e.g., Clark & Gerrit, 1984; Recanati, 2004; Wilson & Sperber, 2012). I will suggest that the recognition of this implicit dissociative attitude requires the exercise of 'second-order' epistemic vigilance and show how this proposal can shed light on the 'developmental puzzle' of irony comprehension.
We are looking forward to see you at the talk!
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
Social Mind Center Events at CEU: http://socialmind.ceu.edu/events
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The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its talk by:
Prof. Stephen Butterfill (Warwick University)
[web<http://www.butterfill.com/>]
Title: A Developmental Puzzle about Goal Tracking
Date: Wednesday, 29 May 2019
Time: 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 st. 7, room 101
Abstract:
Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition. Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions? Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal tracking appear to be limited by their abilities to represent the observed action motorically at the time it occurs? And why does their sensitivity to action sometimes manifest itself differently in dishabituation, pupil dilation and anticipatory looking? Solving these twin puzzles is critical for understanding humans’ earliest sensitivity to others’ actions. After introducing the puzzles, this paper argues that solving them may require identifying multiple, distinct processes for tracking the targets and goals of actions.
We are looking forward to see you.
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
______________________________________________
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The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Joint Music-Making and Temporal Coordination in Joint Action
by
Thomas Wolf
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gunther Knoblich
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Natalie Sebanz
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Erno Teglas, Chair, CEU
Stephen Butterfill<http://www.butterfill.com/>, external examiner, Warwick, and
Peter Keller<https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/our_team/researchers/professor_peter…>, external examiner, Western Sydney University
abstract | When humans engage in joint action, they bring about changes in the environment together by coordinating in space and time. Even such simple joint actions as shaking hands require sophisticated temporal coordination. This is even more obvious for complex forms of joint action, such as joint music-making. Indeed, joint music-making is a domain that demands an exquisite degree of precision in temporal coordination. It also poses additional challenges, which arise from the need to predict and adapt to each other's actions - often on different instruments and with different skill levels - while performing extraordinarily complex patterns and adhering to context-dependent aesthetic criteria and performance targets. In this thesis, I present three studies in which I investigated how expert and novice musicians deal with three such challenges. The findings illuminate the basic mechanisms underpinning humans' remarkable ability to coordinate the timing of their actions both in musical and in non-musical joint actions. In the first study, I investigated expert pianists' ability to adjust their temporal predictions to the systematic, but suboptimal, timing deviations of novice pianists. In a music coordination task, expert pianists had access to different pieces of information about their co-performer and the co-performer's part. The results indicate that experts use information about the novice's performance style during easier passages and information about the novice's part (i.e. the score) during passages that are difficult to perform. In the second study, I asked participants to adapt to an unusual coordination pattern under various coordination conditions. The primary question was whether the weaker coupling between limbs in interpersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of two different individuals) during joint performances allows for better adaptation to difficult coordination patterns than the stronger coupling between limbs in intrapersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of one person). The results show that while strong coupling between limbs facilitates precise coordination in simple coordination patterns, this advantage disappears in more difficult patterns. The third study focuses on a particular performance bias, namely the tendency to gradually increase tempo during joint music-making ('rushing'). The central question was whether this bias is specific to joint performance, or whether it also occurs during solo music-making. The results indicate that rushing is indeed specific to joint performance. Various hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms of rushing are discussed and tested. Of these mechanisms, the findings speak in favor of a combination of human-specific period correction mechanisms, and evolutionarily ancient synchronization mechanisms found even among distantly related species of chorusing insects. In this thesis, I treat the domain of joint music-making as a microcosm in which to study humans' remarkable ability to precisely coordinate their actions in time. The three studies focus on some of the challenges that humans face when trying to coordinate their actions in time during joint music-making, but the findings also have broader significance: they provide us with new insights into the general mechanisms of temporal coordination in humans, and offer new starting points and constraints for research on joint action.
The defense will take place at Oktober 6 street 7, Oktober Hall, on Thursday, May 30, 10 am
organized by the Department of Cognitive Science
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
The Department of Cognitive Science
cordially invites you
to the public defense of the PhD thesis
Joint Music-Making and Temporal Coordination in Joint Action
by
Thomas Wolf
PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Gunther Knoblich
SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Natalie Sebanz
Members of the Dissertation Committee:
Erno Teglas, Chair, CEU
Stephen Butterfill<http://www.butterfill.com/>, external examiner, Warwick, and
Peter Keller<https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/marcs/our_team/researchers/professor_peter…>, external examiner, Western Sydney University
abstract | When humans engage in joint action, they bring about changes in the environment together by coordinating in space and time. Even such simple joint actions as shaking hands require sophisticated temporal coordination. This is even more obvious for complex forms of joint action, such as joint music-making. Indeed, joint music-making is a domain that demands an exquisite degree of precision in temporal coordination. It also poses additional challenges, which arise from the need to predict and adapt to each other's actions - often on different instruments and with different skill levels - while performing extraordinarily complex patterns and adhering to context-dependent aesthetic criteria and performance targets. In this thesis, I present three studies in which I investigated how expert and novice musicians deal with three such challenges. The findings illuminate the basic mechanisms underpinning humans' remarkable ability to coordinate the timing of their actions both in musical and in non-musical joint actions. In the first study, I investigated expert pianists' ability to adjust their temporal predictions to the systematic, but suboptimal, timing deviations of novice pianists. In a music coordination task, expert pianists had access to different pieces of information about their co-performer and the co-performer's part. The results indicate that experts use information about the novice's performance style during easier passages and information about the novice's part (i.e. the score) during passages that are difficult to perform. In the second study, I asked participants to adapt to an unusual coordination pattern under various coordination conditions. The primary question was whether the weaker coupling between limbs in interpersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of two different individuals) during joint performances allows for better adaptation to difficult coordination patterns than the stronger coupling between limbs in intrapersonal coordination (e.g., the two hands of one person). The results show that while strong coupling between limbs facilitates precise coordination in simple coordination patterns, this advantage disappears in more difficult patterns. The third study focuses on a particular performance bias, namely the tendency to gradually increase tempo during joint music-making ('rushing'). The central question was whether this bias is specific to joint performance, or whether it also occurs during solo music-making. The results indicate that rushing is indeed specific to joint performance. Various hypotheses concerning the underlying mechanisms of rushing are discussed and tested. Of these mechanisms, the findings speak in favor of a combination of human-specific period correction mechanisms, and evolutionarily ancient synchronization mechanisms found even among distantly related species of chorusing insects. In this thesis, I treat the domain of joint music-making as a microcosm in which to study humans' remarkable ability to precisely coordinate their actions in time. The three studies focus on some of the challenges that humans face when trying to coordinate their actions in time during joint music-making, but the findings also have broader significance: they provide us with new insights into the general mechanisms of temporal coordination in humans, and offer new starting points and constraints for research on joint action.
The defense will take place at Oktober 6 street 7, Oktober Hall, on Thursday, May 30, 10 am
organized by the Department of Cognitive Science
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to its talk
by:
Prof. *Stephen Butterfill *(Warwick University)
[web <http://www.butterfill.com/>]
Title: *A Developmental Puzzle about Goal Tracking*
Date: Wednesday, 29 May 2019
Time: 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 st. 7, room 10
Abstract:
Sensitivity to others’ actions is essential for social animals like humans
and a fundamental requirement for any kind of social cognition.
Unsurprisingly, it is present in humans from early in the first year of
life. But what processes underpin infants’ sensitivity to others’ actions?
Any attempt to answer this question must solve twin puzzles about the
development of goal tracking. Why does some, but not all, of infants’ goal
tracking appear to be limited by their abilities to represent the observed
action motorically at the time it occurs? And why does their sensitivity to
action sometimes manifest itself differently in dishabituation, pupil
dilation and anticipatory looking? Solving these twin puzzles is critical
for understanding humans’ earliest sensitivity to others’ actions. After
introducing the puzzles, this paper argues that solving them may require
identifying multiple, distinct processes for tracking the targets and goals
of actions.
We are looking forward to see you.
Cognitive Science Events at CEU: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-unsubscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
Kedves Mindenki,
Elérhető a CogStat, automatikus elemző szoftver legújabb kiadása. Az
újdonságok közt elérhetőek új diagram témák; bekerültek további hipotézis
tesztek; a kimeneten további optimalizálások történtek, hogy az eredmények
még könnyebben áttekinthetőek legyenek; a szoftver kipróbálást demó adatok
segítik; egyszerűbbé vált a Mac és a Linux változat telepítése. További
részletek a levelem alatt. A szoftver letölthető a www.cogstat.org oldalról.
Üdv,
Attila
1.8.0
<https://github.com/cogstat/cogstat/blob/master/changelog.md#new-features-1>New
features
- Charts
- Use themes for the charts
- Set theme in CogStat > Preferences menu
- Various chart refinements
- New hypothesis tests
- Dunn's post hoc test after significant Kruskal-Wallis test
- Single case test for slope index
- Numerical results
- Display mean estimations numerically in group comparison and in
repeated measures comparison
- Display standardized effect sizes separately
- Various smaller refinements
- Output improvements
- In warning massages add links to pages with more information about
fixing the issue
- Various smaller output refinements
- Sample data
- Add sample data files
- Add menu to open sample data files (Data > Open demo data files...)
- Graphical user interface improvements
- Add text zooming option to Results menu (Results > Increase text
size, Results > Decrease text size)
- Add splash screen
- Simpler installation
- Simpler Mac installation (thanks to Márton Nagy, Anna Rákóczi and
András Csép)
- Simpler Linux installation
- New localizations
- Slovak (Katarína Sümegiová)
- Thai (Jinshana Praemcheun)
<https://github.com/cogstat/cogstat/blob/master/changelog.md#fixes-1>Fixes
- [image: warning] Fix single-case modified t-test
- Various bugfixes
- Mac specific bug fixes (thanks to Márton Nagy, Anna Rákóczi and András
Csép)
-------------------------------------------
Attila Krajcsi
https://www.thenumberworks.org