[CDC Seminars] four lectures in cognitive science

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