The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you
to its talk by
Vaughn
Becker<http://www.public.asu.edu/~loids/> (Arizona State University)
Date: Wednesday, April 5, 2017 - 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Oktober 6 St. 7, room 101
Coevolutionary Psychology and the Embodied Social Brain: A Functionalist Approach to
Social Signal Detection
"My research explores how social and emotional signals are detected and remembered,
applying classic methods of cognitive science to real-world content and scenarios. I begin
with the assumption that humans share a suite of fundamental Motivational and Emotional
Systems (MES), designed to learn to pick up information about threats and opportunities
relevant to our basic social goals. Experiments on threat detection illustrate both the
biasing and sensitizing effects of such MES, including limits to threat-detection imposed
by bottom-up properties of the signal. Related work on attention and memory suggest that
even transitory activations of MES can enhance information pick-up in measurable ways. At
a more theoretical level, these results suggest that dynamic internal simulations underlie
both perception and action, providing a shared workspace in which MES maintain vigilance
for goal-relevant stimuli and interact with one another when multiple conflicting goals
arise. The central tendencies of these systems are like Jung's Archetypes,
representational proclivities that span the gap between proximate online embodiment and
ancient drives, grounding the symbolic and propositional models of traditional cognitive
science. My research program is now seeking international collaborations in an effort to
generalize our sense of how social signal detection works in the real world. Such
cross-cultural work has the potential to uncover universal principles of emotion-cognition
interactions lurking beneath culturally variable but functionally equivalent
content."
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
______________________________________________
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