by DUCOG - Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science
Dear Colleagues,
We remind you that abstract submissions for the XV. Dubrovnik Conference on
Cognitive Science will be accepted until 28 February 2024 (next week on
Wednesday).
The conference is devoted to Memory, space, and language and will take
place between 23 and 26 May 2024 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.
We invite poster submissions from all areas of cognitive science. Both
theoretical and empirical posters are welcome.
You may submit your poster abstract here: https://ducog.cecog.eu/submit
Authors will be notified of acceptance of their abstracts by 15 March 2024.
For more information, please visit https://ducog.cecog.eu/
or email us at ducog(a)cecog.eu.
On behalf of the organisers,
Attila Keresztes
- Conference chair
__________________________________________________________
INVITED SPEAKERS:
Helen Barron – University of Oxford, UK
Melissa C. Duff - Vanderbilt University, USA
Paul Frankland – University of Toronto, Canada
Monika Schönauer - University of Freiburg, Germany
Jelena Sučević - University of Oxford, UK
Dear All,
The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Language Comprehension Lab<https://lcl.ceu.edu/> invites you to the following talk:
Hugh Rabagliati<https://www.ed.ac.uk/profile/hugh-rabagliati> (The University of Edinburgh)
Biased language and the double-edged sword of efficient communication
Natural language contains and communicates a variety of social biases, a fact that increasingly impacts human activity. Biases in language are typically assumed to reflect biases and prejudices in how we think about social groups, but here I’ll discuss evidence for an additional psychological cause, in which linguistic biases arise as a consequence of the automatised mechanisms that we use to communicate efficiently. Psycholinguistic and developmental experiences document that, when describing events, speakers show a “like me” bias to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups, a fact that holds across demographic categories, linguistic backgrounds, and age. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is not caused by attitudes or social goals, but instead by greater efficiency in retrieving words that refer to in-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language, and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can also have fundamental social implications.
Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Time: 4 pm to 5:30 pm CET
Venue: QS D-001 Tiered* (Vienna)
Topic: Colloquium: Hugh Rabagliati
Time: Feb 21, 2024 04:00 PM Budapest
Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93056812576?pwd=eFBNQUt3b2lxdnFQYU9RRmpoVlpRQT09
Meeting ID: 930 5681 2576
Passcode: 052633
Chair: Eva Wittenberg
*Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP<mailto:socialmind@ceu.edu> to get access to the lecture hall.
Please note that we might make a video recording of the lecture, store the record for an unlimited period of time under CEU’s Panopto account, and share the link with CEU students, staff and faculty.
Best regards,
Andi and Fanni
This e-mail address is managed by the coordinators of the CEU Social Mind Center.
https://socialmind.ceu.edu/
[cid:2294e31e-c5da-4650-a5bd-24382418cc43]
Central European University
Quellenstrasse 51 | 1100 Vienna, Austria
______________________________________________
Subscribe by sending an empty mail to talks-subscribe(a)cogsci.ceu.edu
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Dear All!
We would like to inform you that the date of György Gergely's talk has been changed. The new date is: 17:00 (CET), Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Location: 1064 Budapest, Izabella 46, 101 room
Speaker: György Gergely (Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University - Private University Vienna)
Title: The Pragmatic Stance: Infants’ Naïve Theory of Communicative Action
Abstract:
According to the standard view humans’ species-specific adaptation for linguistic communication relies on two kinds of evolved mechanisms for information transfer:
(i) a system of code-based arbitrary symbols (words) and syntactic combinatorial devises for encoding and decoding the literal meaning of verbal utterances, and
(ii) pragmatic Inferential and mindreading mechanisms for inferring the speaker’s intended meaning from the verbal utterances used in the given communicative context.
Recent evolutionary-based cognitive theories of communication (such as relevance theory, Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2002, and natural pedagogy theory, Gergely & Csibra, 2006, Csibra & Gergely, 2011) proposed that humans’ communicative competence is an early and independent cognitive adaptation selected for recognizing ostensive communicative actions and interpreting the communicative and informative intentions they manifest. On this view, even before and independently of acquiring linguistic skillsthe ‘pragmatic stance’ enables an ostensively addressed human agent to recover from purely non-verbal ostensive communicative action manifestations the relevant information that the communicating partner intends to convey in the given communicative context.
In my talk I’ll focus on our recent studies exploring the hypothesis that young preverbal infants’ can recognize contingent turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar signal sequences as an informative cue indicating ostensive communicative transfer of new and relevant information between cooperating epistemic agents.
First, I’ll summarize evidence from natural pedagogy theory demonstrating preverbal infants’ evolved sensitivity to certain behavioral signals (such as eye-contact, or motherese) that are interpreted as ostensive communicative acts and induce assumptions of referential intention, presumption of relevance, and special interpretive biases in the infants about the intended informative contents conveyed by non-verbal ostensive manifestations. Similarly, 8- and 10-month-olds recognize an unfamiliar entity’s contingent reactivity at a distance as an ostensive cue indicating a communicative agent acting with communicative and referential intentions. When the contingently reactive agent performed a subsequent object-directed orientating action infants reacted with a referential gaze following response to identify the intended referent indicated. Following up on these findings our new studies were designed to test the further hypothesis that young infants may also possess evolved sensitivity to abstract structural constraints on the serial organization of signals that the turn-taking exchange of signal sequences must satisfy to sanction infants’ interpretation that they serve (and indicate) communicative transmission of new and relevant information between the ostensively communicating epistemic agents.
We presented infants with two unfamiliar entities engaged in a repeated turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar (non-speech) sound sequences (triplets of melodic sounds or morse beeps) in three conditions to compare infants’ reactions to three types of serial dependency structure that characterized the exchanged signal sequences. The ‘communicative information transfer’ condition was designed to present infants with repeated turn-taking exchanges of sequences of (non-speech) vocal signals characterized by an algebraic non-local serial dependency structure (satisfying the structural constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar).
The turn-taking exchange of these partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was contrasted with two control conditions characterized either by exchanging (i) perfectly contingent repetitions of identical signal sequences or by exchanging (ii) fully unrelated random series of vocal signals (neither of which could support communicative transmission of novel information). Our third control study compared the ‘communicative information transfer’ condition with a single agent condition in which the structural constraints characterizing the partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was left intact while the condition of turn-taking exchange between two distally interacting agents was violated as only a single agent produced the very same series of vocal signals.
These studies employed a violation-of-expectation looking time paradigm with 10- and 13-month-old infants to test our predictions about infants’ context-based pragmatic inferences and communicative mindreading abilities. In sum, the results provide converging evidence showing that the (as yet largely preverbal) infants could recognize the abstract structural cue of partial variability of signal sequences exchanged by two turn-taking agents. They selectively restricted their attribution of ostensive communication and communicative transfer of relevant information to the condition that satisfied both of the two essential criteria for diagnosing conversational information exchange:
(i) Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal sequences that are exchanged by
(ii) Two distally interacting turn-taking agents in a temporally contingent manner
I’ll end by briefly discussing the multiple implications of these findings for
a) preverbal infants pragmatic inferential and communicative mindreading abilities, and (b) preverbal infants’ preparedness to identify and extract the abstract serial structural properties of signal sequences that satisfy the structural constraints that characterize the syntactic properties of natural languages, which is likely to play an essential role both in the acquisition of word meanings and the syntactic structure of natural languages.
If you have questions about the event, please contact us via email (kelemen.alexandra(a)ppk.elte.hu<mailto:kelemen.alexandra@ppk.elte.hu> or reka.schvajda(a)ppk.elte.hu<mailto:reka.schvajda@ppk.elte.hu>).
We look forward to seeing you at the event,
Alexandra Kelemen
Réka Schvajda
organizers
ELTE Department of Cognitive Psychology
Dear All!
We would like to inform you that the date of György Gergely's talk has been changed. The new date is: 17:00 (CET), Tuesday, 20 February 2024
Location: 1064 Budapest, Izabella 46, 101 room
Speaker: György Gergely (Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University - Private University Vienna)
Title: The Pragmatic Stance: Infants’ Naïve Theory of Communicative Action
Abstract:
According to the standard view humans’ species-specific adaptation for linguistic communication relies on two kinds of evolved mechanisms for information transfer:
(i) a system of code-based arbitrary symbols (words) and syntactic combinatorial devises for encoding and decoding the literal meaning of verbal utterances, and
(ii) pragmatic Inferential and mindreading mechanisms for inferring the speaker’s intended meaning from the verbal utterances used in the given communicative context.
Recent evolutionary-based cognitive theories of communication (such as relevance theory, Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2002, and natural pedagogy theory, Gergely & Csibra, 2006, Csibra & Gergely, 2011) proposed that humans’ communicative competence is an early and independent cognitive adaptation selected for recognizing ostensive communicative actions and interpreting the communicative and informative intentions they manifest. On this view, even before and independently of acquiring linguistic skillsthe ‘pragmatic stance’ enables an ostensively addressed human agent to recover from purely non-verbal ostensive communicative action manifestations the relevant information that the communicating partner intends to convey in the given communicative context.
In my talk I’ll focus on our recent studies exploring the hypothesis that young preverbal infants’ can recognize contingent turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar signal sequences as an informative cue indicating ostensive communicative transfer of new and relevant information between cooperating epistemic agents.
First, I’ll summarize evidence from natural pedagogy theory demonstrating preverbal infants’ evolved sensitivity to certain behavioral signals (such as eye-contact, or motherese) that are interpreted as ostensive communicative acts and induce assumptions of referential intention, presumption of relevance, and special interpretive biases in the infants about the intended informative contents conveyed by non-verbal ostensive manifestations. Similarly, 8- and 10-month-olds recognize an unfamiliar entity’s contingent reactivity at a distance as an ostensive cue indicating a communicative agent acting with communicative and referential intentions. When the contingently reactive agent performed a subsequent object-directed orientating action infants reacted with a referential gaze following response to identify the intended referent indicated. Following up on these findings our new studies were designed to test the further hypothesis that young infants may also possess evolved sensitivity to abstract structural constraints on the serial organization of signals that the turn-taking exchange of signal sequences must satisfy to sanction infants’ interpretation that they serve (and indicate) communicative transmission of new and relevant information between the ostensively communicating epistemic agents.
We presented infants with two unfamiliar entities engaged in a repeated turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar (non-speech) sound sequences (triplets of melodic sounds or morse beeps) in three conditions to compare infants’ reactions to three types of serial dependency structure that characterized the exchanged signal sequences. The ‘communicative information transfer’ condition was designed to present infants with repeated turn-taking exchanges of sequences of (non-speech) vocal signals characterized by an algebraic non-local serial dependency structure (satisfying the structural constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar).
The turn-taking exchange of these partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was contrasted with two control conditions characterized either by exchanging (i) perfectly contingent repetitions of identical signal sequences or by exchanging (ii) fully unrelated random series of vocal signals (neither of which could support communicative transmission of novel information). Our third control study compared the ‘communicative information transfer’ condition with a single agent condition in which the structural constraints characterizing the partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was left intact while the condition of turn-taking exchange between two distally interacting agents was violated as only a single agent produced the very same series of vocal signals.
These studies employed a violation-of-expectation looking time paradigm with 10- and 13-month-old infants to test our predictions about infants’ context-based pragmatic inferences and communicative mindreading abilities. In sum, the results provide converging evidence showing that the (as yet largely preverbal) infants could recognize the abstract structural cue of partial variability of signal sequences exchanged by two turn-taking agents. They selectively restricted their attribution of ostensive communication and communicative transfer of relevant information to the condition that satisfied both of the two essential criteria for diagnosing conversational information exchange:
(i) Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal sequences that are exchanged by
(ii) Two distally interacting turn-taking agents in a temporally contingent manner
I’ll end by briefly discussing the multiple implications of these findings for
a) preverbal infants pragmatic inferential and communicative mindreading abilities, and (b) preverbal infants’ preparedness to identify and extract the abstract serial structural properties of signal sequences that satisfy the structural constraints that characterize the syntactic properties of natural languages, which is likely to play an essential role both in the acquisition of word meanings and the syntactic structure of natural languages.
If you have questions about the event, please contact us via email (kelemen.alexandra(a)ppk.elte.hu<mailto:kelemen.alexandra@ppk.elte.hu> or reka.schvajda(a)ppk.elte.hu<mailto:reka.schvajda@ppk.elte.hu>).
We look forward to seeing you at the event,
Alexandra Kelemen
Réka Schvajda
organizers
ELTE Department of Cognitive Psychology
Dear all,
We would like to invite you to the following talk by György Gergely organized as part of the ELTE Cognitive Seminar series.
Time and date: 17:00 (CET), Tuesday, 13 February 2024
Location: 1064 Budapest, Izabella 46, 101 room
Speaker: György Gergely (Cognitive Development Center, Department of Cognitive Science, Central European University - Private University Vienna)
Title: The Pragmatic Stance: Infants’ Naïve Theory of Communicative Action
Abstract:
According to the standard view humans’ species-specific adaptation for linguistic communication relies on two kinds of evolved mechanisms for information transfer:
(i) a system of code-based arbitrary symbols (words) and syntactic combinatorial devises for encoding and decoding the literal meaning of verbal utterances, and
(ii) pragmatic Inferential and mindreading mechanisms for inferring the speaker’s intended meaning from the verbal utterances used in the given communicative context.
Recent evolutionary-based cognitive theories of communication (such as relevance theory, Sperber & Wilson, 1986, 2002, and natural pedagogy theory, Gergely & Csibra, 2006, Csibra & Gergely, 2011) proposed that humans’ communicative competence is an early and independent cognitive adaptation selected for recognizing ostensive communicative actions and interpreting the communicative and informative intentions they manifest. On this view, even before and independently of acquiring linguistic skillsthe ‘pragmatic stance’ enables an ostensively addressed human agent to recover from purely non-verbal ostensive communicative action manifestations the relevant information that the communicating partner intends to convey in the given communicative context.
In my talk I’ll focus on our recent studies exploring the hypothesis that young preverbal infants’ can recognize contingent turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar signal sequences as an informative cue indicating ostensive communicative transfer of new and relevant information between cooperating epistemic agents.
First, I’ll summarize evidence from natural pedagogy theory demonstrating preverbal infants’ evolved sensitivity to certain behavioral signals (such as eye-contact, or motherese) that are interpreted as ostensive communicative acts and induce assumptions of referential intention, presumption of relevance, and special interpretive biases in the infants about the intended informative contents conveyed by non-verbal ostensive manifestations. Similarly, 8- and 10-month-olds recognize an unfamiliar entity’s contingent reactivity at a distance as an ostensive cue indicating a communicative agent acting with communicative and referential intentions. When the contingently reactive agent performed a subsequent object-directed orientating action infants reacted with a referential gaze following response to identify the intended referent indicated. Following up on these findings our new studies were designed to test the further hypothesis that young infants may also possess evolved sensitivity to abstract structural constraints on the serial organization of signals that the turn-taking exchange of signal sequences must satisfy to sanction infants’ interpretation that they serve (and indicate) communicative transmission of new and relevant information between the ostensively communicating epistemic agents.
We presented infants with two unfamiliar entities engaged in a repeated turn-taking exchange of unfamiliar (non-speech) sound sequences (triplets of melodic sounds or morse beeps) in three conditions to compare infants’ reactions to three types of serial dependency structure that characterized the exchanged signal sequences. The ‘communicative information transfer’ condition was designed to present infants with repeated turn-taking exchanges of sequences of (non-speech) vocal signals characterized by an algebraic non-local serial dependency structure (satisfying the structural constraint on linguistic signal sequences of natural languages that support syntactic rules of a context-free phrase-structure grammar).
The turn-taking exchange of these partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was contrasted with two control conditions characterized either by exchanging (i) perfectly contingent repetitions of identical signal sequences or by exchanging (ii) fully unrelated random series of vocal signals (neither of which could support communicative transmission of novel information). Our third control study compared the ‘communicative information transfer’ condition with a single agent condition in which the structural constraints characterizing the partially co-dependent and partially variable signal sequences was left intact while the condition of turn-taking exchange between two distally interacting agents was violated as only a single agent produced the very same series of vocal signals.
These studies employed a violation-of-expectation looking time paradigm with 10- and 13-month-old infants to test our predictions about infants’ context-based pragmatic inferences and communicative mindreading abilities. In sum, the results provide converging evidence showing that the (as yet largely preverbal) infants could recognize the abstract structural cue of partial variability of signal sequences exchanged by two turn-taking agents. They selectively restricted their attribution of ostensive communication and communicative transfer of relevant information to the condition that satisfied both of the two essential criteria for diagnosing conversational information exchange:
(i) Partial co-dependence and partial variability of the signal sequences that are exchanged by
(ii) Two distally interacting turn-taking agents in a temporally contingent manner
I’ll end by briefly discussing the multiple implications of these findings for
a) preverbal infants pragmatic inferential and communicative mindreading abilities, and (b) preverbal infants’ preparedness to identify and extract the abstract serial structural properties of signal sequences that satisfy the structural constraints that characterize the syntactic properties of natural languages, which is likely to play an essential role both in the acquisition of word meanings and the syntactic structure of natural languages.
If you have questions about the event, please contact us via email (kelemen.alexandra(a)ppk.elte.hu or reka.schvajda(a)ppk.elte.hu).
We look forward to seeing you at the event,
Alexandra Kelemen
Réka Schvajda
organizers
ELTE Department of Cognitive Psychology
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to the Work in Progress Student Symposium 2024, organized by
the Department of Cognitive Psychology at ELTE.
Date and time: Wednesday, February 7, 2024, 9:30 AM
Location: ELTE Psychology Institute, 1064 Budapest, Izabella u. 46, Room 101
Please find attached the detailed programme.
Best,
Rebeka
Dear Colleagues,
We invite you to the Work in Progress Student Symposium 2024, organized by
the Department of Cognitive Psychology at ELTE.
Date and time: Wednesday, February 7, 2024, 9:30 AM
Location: ELTE Psychology Institute, 1064 Budapest, Izabella u. 46, Room 101
Please find attached the detailed programme.
Best,
Rebeka
Dear Colleagues,
Below, you will find available postdoc positions in Sweden.
Best,
Anett
From: Carina Rönnqvist <carina.ronnqvist(a)umu.se<mailto:carina.ronnqvist@umu.se>>
Sent: onsdag 31. januar 2024 17:45
To:
Subject: Please forward: Postdoctoral positions in educational sciences
Dear colleagues,
Please forward this information to your contacts and to potential applicants:
In order to further strengthen educational research science at Umeå University, the School of Education is announcing four postdoctoral positions in collaboration with university departments and centres. Three of these positions require no knowledge of Swedish.
The application deadline is March 6, 2024. The first day of employment is to be agreed upon.
More information about the positions and how to apply:
4 Postdoctoral Positions within the field of Educational Sciences (varbi.com)<https://umu.varbi.com/en/what:job/jobID:695862/>
All the best,
Carina
Carina Rönnqvist
Ph.D in History
Research coordinator
Umeå School of Education
Umeå University
SE 901 87 Umeå
SWEDEN
by DUCOG - Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science
Dear All,
We kindly remind you that submissions are open for the XV. Dubrovnik
Conference on Cognitive Science devoted to Memory, space, and language. The
conference will take place between 23 and 26 May 2024 in Dubrovnik, Croatia
.
DUCOG 2024 brings together researchers striving to understand what shared
neural and cognitive mechanisms allow humans and non-human animals to
represent and process memory, space, and language and how these mechanisms
change across the lifespan. Our goal is to uncover synergies and opposing
views of approaches from different levels of analysis, from cellular through
systems level neuroscience to cognitive- and neuropsychology, in order to
facilitate cross-talk between currently independent research fields to
inspire novel research.
Invited speakers will include:
Helen Barron – University of Oxford, UK
Melissa C. Duff - Vanderbilt University, USA
Paul Frankland – University of Toronto, Canada
Monika Schönauer - University of Freiburg, Germany
Jelena Sučević - University of Oxford, UK
We invite poster submissions from all areas of cognitive science. Both
theoretical and empirical posters are welcome.
You may submit your poster abstract here: https://ducog.cecog.eu/submit
The deadline for abstract submission is 28 February 2024.
Authors will be notified of acceptance of their abstracts by 15 March 2024.
For more information, please visit <https://ducog.cecog.eu/>
https://ducog.cecog.eu/
or email us at ducog(a)cecog.eu.
On behalf of the organisers,
Attila Keresztes,
Markus Werkle-Bergner
- Conference chairs