Dear All, This is a kind reminder about the tomorrow talk starting at 4 pm in room D001. Best regards, Reka From: Talks &lt;talks-bounces(a)cogsci.ceu.edu&gt; On Behalf Of Gyorgyne Finta Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2026 10:34 AM To: &#39;talks(a)cogsci.ceu.edu&#39; &lt;talks(a)cogsci.ceu.edu&gt; Subject: [CEU Cogsci Talks] Samuel Ronfard (University of Toronto): Knowing vs. Doing: Why Children and Adults Avoid Learning from Disagreement, March 4, 2026, 4 pm The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by: Samuel Ronfard (University of Toronto)<https://www.utm.utoronto.ca/psychology/people/samuel-ronfard> Date: on Wednesday, March 4, 2026 Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET Venue: D001 (QS Vienna) and Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/91754034738?pwd=Y4IHvNx7PjIndJ4TKsE6niDpOCis1A.1&… Meeting ID: 917 5403 4738 Passcode: 437807 Chair: Azzurra Ruggeri Title: Knowing vs. Doing: Why Children and Adults Avoid Learning from Disagreement Abstract: While disagreement can promote critical thinking and reduce overconfidence, both children and adults tend to avoid conflicting views, preferring likeminded peers and confirming information. This talk presents a series of studies examining how children and adults reason about disagreement and whether interventions can close the gap between recognizing its value and actually engaging with it. Our research reveals a clear developmental pattern. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that while 4- to 8-year-olds and adults recognize some benefits of learning from disagreement, this recognition varies as a function of whether the question has a determinate answer - both children and adults see greater epistemic value in disagreement on open-ended questions than on those with clear right answers. Moreover, the ability to articulate why disagreement is valuable emerges around age 7. Yet recognition does not translate into action. Study 3 shows that both children and adults are more willing to recommend that others seek out disagreement than to do so themselves - consistent with the view that perceived social costs outweigh recognized epistemic benefits. To test whether this gap can be closed, Studies 4-6 examined interventions including explicit instruction and self-distancing prompts. These increased willingness to engage with opposing views in older children (ages 10-11) and adults, though younger children remained resistant. Study 7 further shows that perspective-taking ability predicted both understanding disagreement's value and willingness to engage with opposing views. Together, these findings shed light on the cognitive and social factors that shape intellectual humility, with implications for how open-mindedness might be fostered in educational settings. *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must reply here<https://forms.office.com/e/BkjVf9GZii> to get access to the lecture hall. Let Azzurra know, please, if you would like to schedule a meeting with the speaker. Best, Reka [cid:image001.png@01DCAAFE.AA7AEC70] Györgyné Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of Cognitive Science Pronouns: she/her | szabor@ceu.edu<mailto:szabor@ceu.edu> | +43 1 25230 5138 CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY Quellenstrasse 51 | A-1100 Vienna | Austria | www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> [signature_4100317087]<https://www.facebook.com/WeAreCEU/> [signature_3650446863] <https://www.instagram.com/weareceu/> [signature_2213595878] <https://at.linkedin.com/school/central-european-university/> [signature_973538284] <https://www.threads.net/@weareceu> [signature_3302971874] <https://twitter.com/ceu> ______________________________________________ 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

Dear all, This is a kind reminder about our tomorrow talk by Beverly Wright starting at 4 pm in room D001: **************************** The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by: Beverly Wright (Northwestern University)<https://events.ceu.edu/2026-04-15/departmental-colloquium-be… Date: Wednesday, April 15, 2026 Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET Venue: D001 (QS Vienna) and Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92604526241?pwd=SBWmzlQWsxIZRDMmH0bbXVAbypTSK6.1&… Meeting ID: 926 0452 6241 Passcode: 806855 Chair: József Fiser Post-training phases of auditory perceptual learning Beverly A. Wright Northwestern University During learning, memories are transformed to a stable state through a post-training process of consolidation. Work in non-human species indicates that this process involves multiple phases with distinct time courses and molecular requirements. This work also indicates that the transitions between memory phases are commonly associated with transient memory lapses. However, while these lapses have been thoroughly documented in non-human species, they have been reported only rarely in humans and never for skill learning. Recently, we have observed transient memory lapses in humans on two separate auditory perceptual-learning tasks. For each, a clear reduction in memory occurs 1-3 hours after training. Moreover, the memory-lapse kinetics dovetail with those of two other phenomena: (a) a reconsolidation-like process that ends ~1 hour after training and (b) a learning refractory period that ends ~6-10 hours after training. Thus, perceptual memories undergo a marked shift in the first few post-training hours, and transient memory lapses may be a common but overlooked facet of memory formation in humans. *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must reply here<https://forms.office.com/e/9ds8uumY92> to get access to the lecture hall. Let Jozsef know, please, if you would like to schedule a meeting with the speaker. Best, Reka [cid:image001.png@01DCCBFB.ED34C2C0] Györgyné Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of Cognitive Science Pronouns: she/her | szabor@ceu.edu<mailto:szabor@ceu.edu> | +43 1 25230 5138 CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY Quellenstrasse 51 | A-1100 Vienna | Austria | www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> [signature_4100317087]<https://www.facebook.com/WeAreCEU/> [signature_3650446863] <https://www.instagram.com/weareceu/> [signature_2213595878] <https://at.linkedin.com/school/central-european-university/> [signature_973538284] <https://www.threads.net/@weareceu> [signature_3302971874] <https://twitter.com/ceu> ______________________________________________ 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

Dear All, I am sorry for the typo, the talk is on 17 February, on Tuesday at 2 pm! Sorry for the confusion! Kind regards, Reka From: Gyorgyne Finta Sent: Thursday, February 12, 2026 9:41 AM To: &#39;talks(a)cogsci.ceu.edu&#39; &lt;talks(a)cogsci.ceu.edu&gt; Subject: Kristen Syrett (Rutgers University – New Brunswick): How the linguistic context scaffolds the acquisition of emotion and mental state adjectives, Febr 17, 2026 The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by: Kristen Syrett, Rutgers University – New Brunswick<https://sites.rutgers.edu/kristen-syrett/about/> Date: Wednesday, TUESDAY February 17, 2026 Time: 2 pm (to 3:30 pm) CET (MIND the unusual starting time please!) Venue: D002 (QS Vienna) and Zoom https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92587555406?pwd=3wouq7fOCkfPPbQ2AnMrYla4qChxaN.1&… Meeting ID: 925 8755 5406 Passcode: 894093 Chair: Ernő Téglás Title: How the linguistic context scaffolds the acquisition of emotion and mental state adjectives Abstract: A perennial question guiding our investigations as linguists and cognitive scientists is how young children acquire the meaning of words, given the vast range of possible interpretations in any given discourse context and the limited and error-ridden input to which children are exposed. The challenge is amplified for those words whose meanings have no stable physical correlate. One popular and successful proposal is that children can look to the syntactic structure of the utterance in which a word appears to inform our understanding of that word’s semantic representation. This ‘syntactic bootstrapping’ process hinges upon a tight relation between syntax and semantics, and children’s knowledge of it, for children to engage in a sentence-to-world mapping in order to narrow the hypothesis space of meanings. In recent years, researchers have extended this process to mental state (or propositional attitude) verbs, which take clausal complements to signal a subject/agent’s beliefs, desires, and preferences about the world. Interestingly, verbs are not the only words that take syntactic arguments: some adjectives do as well. Moreover, some of these adjectives—those that denote emotions or mental states—place additional semantic restrictions on their subject, requiring it to be an animate experiencer that has the capacity to be, e.g., sad, happy, curious, anxious, surprised, or confident. In this talk, I present collaborative work with Misha Becker documenting that not only are these distributional cues about subject animacy and syntactic complementation present in the speech to which children are exposed at significant frequencies, young children systematically recruit these cues and display knowledge of these selectional constraints in an experimental setting. This work thus demonstrates a wider applicability for syntactic bootstrapping across grammatical categories, and illustrating how the linguistic context supports the acquisition of word meaning even for those meanings that are internal and abstract. *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must reply here<https://forms.office.com/e/QFQM1rR8ic> to get access to the lecture hall. Let Ernő know, please, if you would like to schedule a meeting with the speaker. Best, Reka [cid:image001.png@01DC9C0B.68E42DF0] Györgyné Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of Cognitive Science Pronouns: she/her | szabor@ceu.edu<mailto:szabor@ceu.edu> | +43 1 25230 5138 CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY Quellenstrasse 51 | A-1100 Vienna | Austria | www.ceu.edu<http://www.ceu.edu/> [signature_4100317087]<https://www.facebook.com/WeAreCEU/> [signature_3650446863] <https://www.instagram.com/weareceu/> [signature_2213595878] <https://at.linkedin.com/school/central-european-university/> [signature_973538284] <https://www.threads.net/@weareceu> [signature_3302971874] <https://twitter.com/ceu> ______________________________________________ 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