[koglist] [CDC Seminars] REMINDER: CDC Seminar - Hanna Marno, Wednesday, May 25, 5 PM

The next talk in the CDC seminar series will be given by Hanna Marno, CEU Date: Wednesday, May 25, 2011, 5 PM Location: CEU Cognitive Development Center, Hattyú u. 14, 3rd floor How do we learn about objects in the context of communication? Abstract: Humans, uniquely among animals, learn from each other by receiving semantic information via communication. It has been hypothesized that the emergence of this ability is supported by perceptual biases in learning that would make people more likely to extract semantically relevant features of a scene in a communicative context. According to this hypothesis, when people observe an object in an ambiguous communicative context, they would be biased to encode the permanent features of the object, such as its colour or shape, at the expense of its transient features, such as its location. Although experimental evidence with young infants corroborated this proposal, it has been unclear whether the same tendency still exists in adults. I will present a series of studies that provides evidence that, similarly to infants, adults have a tendency to preferentially encode permanent features of objects under communicative contexts. By using a change detection paradigm, our first series of studies focused on immediate perceptual coding. We found that people more likely detect changes of identity than changes of location of objects when the objects are presented in the context of communication. Our second series of studies tested the long-term effect of communicative cues on memory representations. By using a recall task, we found that subjects memorised and recalled the permanent features of objects more reliably in situations where the objects were encountered in a communicative context. Together these studies shed new light on the complex interaction between communication and learning in humans. _______________________________________________ Subscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-subscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu Unsubscribe by sending an empty mail to seminars-unsubscribe(a)cdc.ceu.hu