Date: Friday, November 5
Time: 10.00am to 11.30am
Venue: Tóth István György Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 11. Courtyard (NOTE the different venue!)
Speaker:
Máté Lengyel, Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Cambridge University
Title:
Learning and memory: the powers and perils of Bayesian inference
Abstract:
The theory of Bayesian inference presents a normative approach to understanding how animals and humans learn about their environment. To demonstrate this, I will start by introducing the theory and show as an example how it explains aspects of human chunk learning in a visual learning paradigm that cannot be captured by traditional associative learning accounts. I will then turn to a complementary view of Bayesian inference: how it can be used as a data analysis tool to estimate mental representations of object classes from simple binary response data collected in psychophysical experiments. Such methods can be used to track as humans develop complex internal representations, with minimal changes to already existing experimental paradigms. Finally, I will take a step back, and place learning and memory within the wider context of behavioural economics. I will argue that even though Bayesian inference offers a statistically optimal way for learning, the representations it learns — internal models — can be highly inefficient for decision making. This leaves room for qualitatively different ways of learning to be advantageous under some ecologically relevant conditions. I will show how one such alternative, episodic memory, can be understood as a better way to support optimal decision making under risk and uncertainty in complex environments, and how this normative view of episodic memory accounts for many of its behavioural and neural correlates. These studies together provide a principled framework to explore complex learning and developmental phenomena reported in humans and animals.
Everyone is welcome to attend.
_______________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe at http://cdc.ceu.hu/mailman/listinfo/seminars
THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY FORUM
Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös University
Address: Múzeum krt. 4/i, Budapest
10 November (Wednesday) 5:00 PM Room 226
Márton Gömöri
Department of Logic, Institute of Philosophy, Eötvös University, Budapest
Létezik-e klasszikus leírása a ,,töltött részecskék + elektromágneses mező”
csatolt rendszernek?
(Is there a classical description of the coupled system of "charged particles
+ electromagnetic field"?)
___________________________________
Abstracts and printable program (poster) are available from the web
site of the Forum: http://phil.elte.hu/tpf
(Please feel free to post the program in your institution!)
The Forum is open to everyone, including students, visitors, and faculty
members from all departments and institutes! Format: 60 minute lecture,
coffee break, 60 minute discussion.
The organizer of the Forum: László E. Szabó
(leszabo(a)phil.elte.hu)
--
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Professor of Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC, INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY
EOTVOS UNIVERSITY, BUDAPEST
http://phil.elte.hu/leszabo
KONFERENCIAFELHÍVÁS
A Kaposvári Egyetem Társadalomtudományi Tanszéke a Magyar Kognitív Tudományi
Alapítvánnyal közösen konferenciát szervez
Az észlelés természete
címmel.
A konferencia ideje: 2011. január 27-29.
A konferencia helyszíne: Kaposvári Egyetem, Pedagógiai Kar. (Kaposvár, 7400
Guba Sándor utca 40.)
A konferenciára való jelentkezéseket a xix.makog(a)gmail.com címre kérjük.
A konferencia szervezői:
Tőzsér János jantozser(a)gmail.com
Bács Gábor bacs.gabor2(a)gmail.com
Molnár Gábor molnar.gabor(a)ke.hu
--
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Professor of Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC, INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY
EOTVOS UNIVERSITY, BUDAPEST
http://phil.elte.hu/leszabo
A BME Kognitív Tudományi Tanszék szeretettel vár mindenkit tanszéki
szemináriumsorozatának következő előadására:
Gervain Judit
Université Paris Déscartes, Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception
The use of near-infrared spectroscopy in developmental psychology:
the example of speech perception at birth
helyszín: Stoczek utca 2. St. ép. 320-as terem, 1111 Budapest
időpont: 2010 november 8, 10:00-11:00
!!! Figyelem: a szokásostól eltérően az előadás 10:00-kor kezdődik!!!
Abstract
Near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) is a relatively new but
increasingly popular imaging technique, which measures the
concentration changes of oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin
accompanying brain activity. The technique is particularly useful for
imaging the brain of newborns and young infants whose skin and skull
are thin, allowing a relatively deep penetration of the NIR light
into the cortex. The talk will review the basic principles behind
NIRS. This will be followed by the illustration of the use of NIRS to
study speech perception in newborn infants. The ability to learn
structural regularities is fundamental for the acquisition of
language. There is increasing evidence that older infants are able to
learn such regularities using different mechanisms (Marcus et al.
1999, Gomez and Gerken 1999). However, it is not know whether these
abilities are available at birth or whether they emerge later during
development and their neural basis is also unexplored. Therefore, in
a series of NIRS studies with newborns, we examined whether they are
able to learn identity-based regularities (e.g. ABB "mubaba", AAB
"babamu", ABA "bamuba" etc.). Specifically, we explored whether (i)
they are able to discriminate these patterns from random ABC controls
(e.g. "mubage"), (ii) whether they are able to encode the identity
relation as well as its serial position (i.e. whether they are able
to discriminate AAB from ABB) and (iii) whether this ability is
specific to speech stimuli or whether it applies more broadly to
other auditory stimuli, e.g. piano tones. The results of these
experiments allow us to better understand the mechanisms and the
corresponding neural circuits underlying early speech perception and
language acquisition.
Az előadás nyelve angol
Keresztes Attila
Tudományos segédmunkatárs
Budapesti Műszaki és Gazdaságtudományi Egyetem
Kognitív Tudományi Tanszék,
Stoczek u. 2., Budapest
1111
06 1 4631072
akeresztes(a)cogsci.bme.hu
Kedves Kollégák, Diákok!
Várunk mindenkit Péntek 10-órától nyilvános előadásunkra:
Mari Zoltán (Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, US):
"Pszichológiai hátterű neurológiai betegségek"
Helyszín: Szeged, Egyetem u. 2. BTK épület, Pszichológiai Intézet,
találkozó a Bognár Cecil terem előtt.
Időpont: November 5. péntek 10 óra
üdv.
Dezső
--------------------------------------------------------
Cognitive Science and Neuropsychology Group
Institute of Psychology, University of Szeged, Hungary
Web: http://www.memory-and-language.com
Date: Tuesday, November 2
Time: 2.30pm to 4.00pm
Venue: Gellner Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 9.
Speaker:
Zsófia Virányi, Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna
Title:
Dogs and wolves: Tracking the evolution and the cognitive-emotional mechanisms of human social life
Abstract:
Insightful cognitive abilities as well as high cooperativity and “ultrasocial” emotional attitudes have been proposed to differentiate humans from other animal species. By definition, determining human uniqueness requires comparisons with non-human animals. Further on, comparative cognition contributes to a more complete understanding of human social life by informing us about its evolutionary origins. Firstly I will show results demonstrating that, in contrast with their initial perception as an artificial and human-controlled species, domestic dogs do not necessarily have inferior social cognitive abilities compared to primates, and even more, may represent a better model for human sociality. Dogs often show performance comparable to humans at the behavioural level but are mostly assumed to have less advanced cognitive abilities compared to humans. Consequently, human-like performance in dogs puts a high pressure on cognitive sciences to come up with various hypotheses about the potential underlying mechanisms, and as such, strongly facilitates the development of psychological theory.
Secondly, I will argue that, in parallel with traditional human and non-human primate comparisons, studying the behaviour of the domestic dog and its closest wild-living relative, the wolf provides a unique opportunity to learn about the evolutionary processes that might have been shaping also human cognition as well as about the functions of social behaviours. Behaviours found in humans and dogs but missing in wolves can be seen as phenotypic convergences and are likely to reflect the operation of adaptive processes. These behaviours have most likely been influenced by the domestication process during the course of which dogs have been selected for cooperating and communicating with humans – as it happened also during human evolution. The first results of comparing longitudinally at the Wolf Science Center how similarly socialized dogs and wolves communicate with conspecifics as well as with humans and read their behaviour indicate that domestication most likely effected both the cognitive abilities and the emotional attitudes of dogs. This seems to confirm the functionality of similarly intertwined cognitive and emotional features of humans that differentiate us from other primates.
Everyone is welcome to attend.
_______________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe at http://cdc.ceu.hu/mailman/listinfo/seminars
THEORETICAL PHILOSOPHY FORUM
Institute of Philosophy
Faculty of Humanities, Eötvös University
Address: Múzeum krt. 4/i, Budapest
3 November (Wednesday) 5:00 PM Room 226
János Tanács
Department of Philosophy and the History of Science
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Érvelő szövegek perbe fogva. Egy sajtó-helyreigazítási per argumentáció-
elméleti elemzésének tanulságai.
(Argumentative writings go to court. Some argumentation theoretical lessons
drawn from an action at law against press)
___________________________________
Abstracts and printable program (poster) are available from the web
site of the Forum: http://phil.elte.hu/tpf
(Please feel free to post the program in your institution!)
The Forum is open to everyone, including students, visitors, and faculty
members from all departments and institutes! Format: 60 minute lecture,
coffee break, 60 minute discussion.
The organizer of the Forum: László E. Szabó
(leszabo(a)phil.elte.hu)
--
L a s z l o E. S z a b o
Professor of Philosophy
DEPARTMENT OF LOGIC, INSTITUTE OF PHILOSOPHY
EOTVOS UNIVERSITY, BUDAPEST
http://phil.elte.hu/leszabo
Szeretettel várunk minden kedves érdeklődőt kedden!
Időpont:Kedd, nov. 2. 16hHelyszín:Pázmány P. Kat. Egyetem - ITK (1083, Práter utca 50/a) Kari Tanácsterem (204-es szoba) Dr. Roman Freunberger, PhDtudományos munkatárs,
Department of Psychology,
University of Salzburg
http://www.uni-salzburg.at/portal/page?_pageid=138,414035&_dad=portal&_sche… Are alpha oscillations a neural correlate of inhibition? Human alpha oscillations, appearing as high amplitude 10 Hz waves in the human electroencephalogram (EEG) during rest, were continuously considered as background noise. Recent investigations highlight alpha as an important attentional mechanism that serves as active ‘gatekeeper’ for sensory information processing. Increasing evidence suggest that alpha is inhibitory in nature suppressing irrelevant information processing. Studies from vision, memory and attention are presented to show if alpha is indeed inhibitory and reflects more than mere background noise. Az előadás után kötetlen beszélgetésre invitáljuk Önöket kávéés süti kíséretében! Szervezők
There will be four lectures in cognitive science next week at CEU. Note that the venue for all of them is at the main CEU site in Pest and NOT at the CDC in Hattyúház.
Everyone is welcome to attend. The lectures will start on time.
---
Date: Tuesday, November 2
Time: 2.30pm to 4.00pm
Venue: Gellner Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 9.
Speaker:
Zsófia Virányi, Department of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna
Title:
Dogs and wolves: Tracking the evolution and the cognitive-emotional mechanisms of human social life
Abstract:
Insightful cognitive abilities as well as high cooperativity and “ultrasocial” emotional attitudes have been proposed to differentiate humans from other animal species. By definition, determining human uniqueness requires comparisons with non-human animals. Further on, comparative cognition contributes to a more complete understanding of human social life by informing us about its evolutionary origins. Firstly I will show results demonstrating that, in contrast with their initial perception as an artificial and human-controlled species, domestic dogs do not necessarily have inferior social cognitive abilities compared to primates, and even more, may represent a better model for human sociality. Dogs often show performance comparable to humans at the behavioural level but are mostly assumed to have less advanced cognitive abilities compared to humans. Consequently, human-like performance in dogs puts a high pressure on cognitive sciences to come up with various hypotheses about the potential underlying mechanisms, and as such, strongly facilitates the development of psychological theory.
Secondly, I will argue that, in parallel with traditional human and non-human primate comparisons, studying the behaviour of the domestic dog and its closest wild-living relative, the wolf provides a unique opportunity to learn about the evolutionary processes that might have been shaping also human cognition as well as about the functions of social behaviours. Behaviours found in humans and dogs but missing in wolves can be seen as phenotypic convergences and are likely to reflect the operation of adaptive processes. These behaviours have most likely been influenced by the domestication process during the course of which dogs have been selected for cooperating and communicating with humans – as it happened also during human evolution. The first results of comparing longitudinally at the Wolf Science Center how similarly socialized dogs and wolves communicate with conspecifics as well as with humans and read their behaviour indicate that domestication most likely effected both the cognitive abilities and the emotional attitudes of dogs. This seems to confirm the functionality of similarly intertwined cognitive and emotional features of humans that differentiate us from other primates.
---
Date: Wednesday, November 3
Time: 10.00am to 11.30am
Venue: Gellner Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 9.
Speaker:
Guenther Knoblich, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Nijmegen
Title:
The social nature of perception action links
Abstract:
Previous research in Cognitive Science has often treated social cognition as residing on top of a cognitive hierarchy. Recently, however, it has become clear that basic perception action links can do a lot of the work in social cognition that was previously attributed to high-level inferences. Using examples from music and other domains I will first demonstrate how establishing perception action links while learning new motor skills can reshape a person’s perception, e.g., the ability to play piano shapes perception of self-produced sounds. Then, I will show that a person’s skills can also affect perception of events that others produce, e.g., the ability to play piano shapes perception of sounds produced by others. Finally, I will demonstrate that the inability to sense one's own body can lead to subtle impairments of a person’s understanding of others' expectations. All of these results suggest that close perception action links play a crucial role in perceiving, predicting, and understanding others' actions. The social nature of perception action links also generates new perspectives for understanding interpersonal action coordination and agency in social interaction.
---
Date: Wednesday, November 3
Time: 2.30pm to 4.00pm
Venue: Gellner Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 9.
Speaker:
Natalie Sebanz, Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition, and Behavior, Nijmegen
Title:
Joint Action: What is Shared?
Abstract:
Growing interest in joint action, the ability to coordinate actions with others to bring about changes in the environment, has prompted questions about how individuals acting together take into account each other’s intentions, tasks, and actions. In this talk I will provide an overview of recent studies that have addressed these questions. Behavioural and electrophysiological experiments where pairs of participants performed tasks together showed that individual task performance changed as a function of the co-actor’s task even when this task was irrelevant for individual performance. These results indicate that people have a tendency to represent co-actors’ tasks and actions. New results on inter-group mimicry suggest that people acting together also form specific representations of actions to be performed jointly. I will discuss how these findings contribute to our understanding of the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying joint action and consider implications for philosophical accounts of shared intentionality.
---
Date: Friday, November 5
Time: 10.00am to 11.30am
Venue: Tóth István György Room, CEU, 1051 Nádor u. 11. (NOTE the different venue!)
Speaker:
Máté Lengyel, Computational and Biological Learning Lab, Cambridge University
Title:
Learning and memory: the powers and perils of Bayesian inference
Abstract:
The theory of Bayesian inference presents a normative approach to understanding how animals and humans learn about their environment. To demonstrate this, I will start by introducing the theory and show as an example how it explains aspects of human chunk learning in a visual learning paradigm that cannot be captured by traditional associative learning accounts. I will then turn to a complementary view of Bayesian inference: how it can be used as a data analysis tool to estimate mental representations of object classes from simple binary response data collected in psychophysical experiments. Such methods can be used to track as humans develop complex internal representations, with minimal changes to already existing experimental paradigms. Finally, I will take a step back, and place learning and memory within the wider context of behavioural economics. I will argue that even though Bayesian inference offers a statistically optimal way for learning, the representations it learns — internal models — can be highly inefficient for decision making. This leaves room for qualitatively different ways of learning to be advantageous under some ecologically relevant conditions. I will show how one such alternative, episodic memory, can be understood as a better way to support optimal decision making under risk and uncertainty in complex environments, and how this normative view of episodic memory accounts for many of its behavioural and neural correlates. These studies together provide a principled framework to explore complex learning and developmental phenomena reported in humans and animals.
---
See also our web page at http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events
_______________________________________________
Subscribe/Unsubscribe at http://cdc.ceu.hu/mailman/listinfo/seminars
Kedves Kollégák!
Molnár Zsolt botanikus vagyok, az MTA Ökológiai és Botanikai
Kutatóintézetében dolgozom főmunkatársként. Egyik kutatási témám gyimesi
parasztemberek és hortobágyi pásztorok természetismerete. Az érdekel, hogy
milyen ismeretekkel bírnak a körülöttük lévő táj növényeiről, növényzeti
típusairól, a táj biológiai változásairól, hogyan érzekelik, hogyan képezik
le maguknak a körülöttük lévő természeti tájat, annak elsősorban növényzetét
(csatoltam két vonatkozó cikkünket).
A további kutatáshoz kognitív kérdésekben jártas partnereket keresek, mert a
nemzetközi irodalmat áttekintve egyre gyakrabban kerülnek elő kognitív
psychológiai és a kognitív antropológiai kérdések. Ehhez én nem értek,
viszont azt látom, hogy ebbe az irányba érdemes további kutatásokat végezni,
hiszen Európában az ilyen vegetációs-percepciós kutatások igen ritkák,
ugyanakkor a természetvédelmi kérdések kapcsán különösen fontosak lennének.
A listát sajnos nem ismerem, ezért kérem, akit érdekel ilyen jellegű
kooperáció, keressen az emilemen (molnar@botanika
<mailto:molnar@botabika.hu> .hu) vagy telefonon (30/399-4881).
Köszönettel:
Molnár Zsolt
tudományos főmunkatárs
MTA Ökológiai és Botanikai Kutatóintézete
Vácrátót
