Dear All, A kind reminder about the tomorrow defense of Max starting at 11:20 in room D002. **** The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis Acting in the We-Mode: The Content and Structure of Joint Task Representations by Maximilian Marschner Tuesday, December 2, 11:20 a.M. CET Room D002 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Join Zoom Meeting D002 https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91311996297?pwd=hxHbAD3gAaur1hbUaXlShDsm91RrKZ.1&… Meeting ID: 913 1199 6297 Passcode: 115661 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Günther Knoblich (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Marcel Brass (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Eva Wittenberg, Chair, CEU Lucia Maria Sacheli<https://en.unimib.it/lucia-maria-sacheli> External Reviewer, Department of Psychology at the University of Milano-Bicocca, Italy Roland Pfister<https://www.uni-trier.de/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-i/faecher-und-institute/psychologie/professuren/allgemeine-psychologie/team/prof-dr-roland-pfister> External Reviewer, Department of Psychology<https://www.uni-trier.de/en/universitaet/fachbereiche-faecher/fachbereich-i/faecher-und-institute/psychologie/professorium>, Trier University, Germany. *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/XV60pRz7us> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |The ability to coordinate our actions with others to reach shared goals is a hallmark of human sociality. What are the cognitive foundations for this ability? In the present dissertation, I addressed this question by investigating the content and structure of joint task representations, i.e., of the mental representations that guide action planning and control in joint action by specifying what co-actors need to do to reach their goals. Distinguishing different theoretical proposals of how joint task representations could be structured, the present dissertation tested central assumptions of one of these proposals, referred to as the relational structure of joint task representations. This proposal posits that joint task representations encode group-level relations between co-actors' individual task contributions, thereby capturing how joint actions are performed at the level of the group rather than at the level of the separate interacting individuals. The present dissertation comprises four empirical research projects testing this proposal by investigating anticipated imitation effects in social interactions between groups (Study I), action-outcome learning in synchronous joint action (Study II), and modulations of imitative response tendencies in joint task settings (Study III and IV). Study I showed that anticipated imitation effects can be shaped by group-level congruency relations, but also pointed to limitations in how readily people integrate others' actions into their own task representations. Study II showed that action-outcome learning is sensitive to group-level relations between co-actors' individual task contributions. Yet, it also indicated that the application of joint task representations embedding a relational structure is cognitively costly and not necessarily the default in task contexts featuring other co-actors. Finally, Study III and Study IV revealed that shared goals that specify relations between the outcomes of own and others' individual task contributions are limited in modulating imitative response tendencies in interactive task settings. This indicates that the representations guiding action selection and control in interactive task settings may often remain anchored at individual rather than group-level performance. Taken together, the findings of the present dissertation provide novel support for the proposal that joint task representations can encode group-level relations between co-actors' individual task contributions. At the same time, they reveal important limits on how readily these representations get employed in interactive task settings. These findings indicate that joint task representations do not default to a fixed structure, but become flexibly adapted to the coordination demands, temporal dynamics and specific characteristics of the task at hand. These findings advance our understanding of the cognitive architecture underlying joint action, indicating that the content and structure of joint task representations is determined by construal processes balancing costs and benefits of different representational structures. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC62B9.AA76B390] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC62B9.AA76B390] CEU GmbH - CEU Central European University private university Quellenstrasse 51, A-1100 Wien, Room B502 Office: +43 125230 5138 cognitivescience.ceu.edu<https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/>| www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CEU is committed to energy and environmental sustainability www.ceu.hu/sustainability<http://www.ceu.hu/sustainability> [https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wJmntYV9xI46HE4vvhea1QVsjj…] Please, consider your environmental responsibility. 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The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis INFERRING TEMPORAL ORDER IN LANGUAGE COMPREHENSION by Elena Marx Tuesday, January 13, 3 P.M. CET QS Auditorium (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97449457820?pwd=MKOSvQ2ATdtpwzVVSZSWDj0Iwab4ka.1&… Meeting ID: 974 4945 7820 Passcode: 835739 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Éva Wittenberg (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Ágnes Melinda Kovács (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Gergely Csibra, Chair, CEU Gerry Altmann<https://psychology.uconn.edu/person/gerry-altmann/>n/>, University of Connecticut as External Examiner Ercenur Ünal<https://www.mpi.nl/people/unal-ercenur>, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics as External Examiner *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/QLUr0KiZPL> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |How do people order events in their mind when listening to a story? Language often provides explicit hints as to whether something has happened, will happen or happened before or after something else. However, in many cases, the temporal order between linguistically described situations is underspecified and needs to be inferred. This thesis proposes that such inferences are grounded in more general cognitive principles that take event dynamicity - namely, whether situations are inherently static or change over time - as a starting point. Specifically, I propose that comprehenders infer more salient events to happen against the backdrop of less salient states. Four lines of experiments serve to test this proposal experimentally. The first study provides first empirical evidence that temporal interpretation is systematically driven by encoded event dynamicity. Participants reliably matched complex situation descriptions to visual sequences in which described states preceded described events. The second study replicates this pattern of results in three languages in an act-out task, demonstrating that this interpretative preference arises in the absence of visual scaffolding. The third study extends the linguistic context under investigation from complex sentence descriptions to discourse. The fourth study delves deeper into the underlying mechanisms of this temporal inference by using different tenses, thereby testing competing explanations based on linguistic encoding and more general cognitive principles. Overall, this thesis sheds light on the broader question of how event cognition and language interact to form mental representations of temporal relations. Its findings support models of event comprehension that treat event structure, more specifically the presence or absence of dynamic change, as a central organizing principle for understanding temporal structure in language. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC83B7.EB855570] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC83B7.EB855570] CEU GmbH - CEU Central European University private university Quellenstrasse 51, A-1100 Wien, Room B502 Office: +43 125230 5138 cognitivescience.ceu.edu<https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/>| www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CEU is committed to energy and environmental sustainability www.ceu.hu/sustainability<http://www.ceu.hu/sustainability> [https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wJmntYV9xI46HE4vvhea1QVsjj…] Please, consider your environmental responsibility. Before printing this e-mail message, ask yourself whether you really need a hard copy. ______________________________________________ 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

The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis Developing an Understanding of Gradable Complementaries by Levente Madarász Monday, February 16, 3 P.M. CET Room C323 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/97977961120?pwd=hB46T8WUzoyVgytP2Nz0EC2iNWGM8O.1&… Meeting ID: 979 7796 1120 Passcode: 432875 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Ernő Téglás (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: Dan Sperber (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Christophe Heintz Chair, CEU Krysten Syrett<https://sites.rutgers.edu/kristen-syrett/about/>t/>, Professor, Department of Linguistics and the Center for Cognitive Science (RuCCS), at Rutgers University as External Examiner Nausicaa Pouscoulous<https://profiles.ucl.ac.uk/4982-nausicaa-pouscoulous>, Associate Professor, University College London as External Examiner *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/b4FJpJKHGx> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |Research in the area of semantics highlighted that certain gradable adjective pairs might relate to each other in a complementary fashion (e.g., clean:dirty, dry:wet, smooth:rough, etc., Cruse 1980; Rotstein and Winter 2004; Kennedy and McNally 2005, a.o.). The results of empirical works have suggested that not only adults, but younger children too are sensitive to the distinction between such gradable complementaries and adjectives falling into different typological groups (Frazier, Clifton Jr, and Stolterfoht 2008; Syrett, Kennedy, and Lidz 2010; Syrett and Lidz 2010, a.o.). This dissertation contributes to these findings by addressing different developmental aspects of these expressions. Utilizing a novel choice task, Study 1 aimed to illuminate how children judge gradable complementaries when those modify plural entities. Relying on both corpus data and a parental survey, Study 2 explores how gradable complementary terms appear in the productive vocabulary of children acquiring Hungarian, and follows up on the findings with an experimental investigation. Lastly, with an other novel choice task, Study 3 aims to establish if upon identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective children benefit from an information that it is not applicable to some degrees of a gradable complementary attribute. The observations made in these studies are indicative in the following respects: Study 1 showed that the way 4-year-old children judged the applicability of the attributes clean and dirty applied to a set of items differed from how 5-year-olds approached the same problem. Study 2 indicated that when considering gradable complementary pairs, children acquiring Hungarian have a tendency to verbalize the partial members of these terms prior to their total counterparts. While Study 3 indicated that older (but not younger) 4-year-old children might be more likely to benefit from cues pertaining to the inapplicability of an item with an interim degree of a minimal-standard attribute in identifying the meaning of a previously unheard adjective. Considered together, the observations made in these studies add to previous results in that they show how aspects of the use, production and identification of such descriptions develop, often into the late preschool years. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC9A7A.94AD5F70] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC9A7A.94AD5F70] CEU GmbH - CEU Central European University private university Quellenstrasse 51, A-1100 Wien, Room B502 Office: +43 125230 5138 cognitivescience.ceu.edu<https://cognitivescience.ceu.edu/>| www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- CEU is committed to energy and environmental sustainability www.ceu.hu/sustainability<http://www.ceu.hu/sustainability> [https://ci3.googleusercontent.com/mail-sig/AIorK4wJmntYV9xI46HE4vvhea1QVsjj…] Please, consider your environmental responsibility. Before printing this e-mail message, ask yourself whether you really need a hard copy. ______________________________________________ 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