All talks will be held at the CEU Cognitive Development Center, Hattyú u.
14, Budapest, 3rd floor.
*
Gossip and Reputation in Natural Societies and Artificial
Settings<http://www.ceu.hu/events/2010-11-24/gossip-and-reputation-in-natural-societies-and-artificial-settings>
*
Francesca Giardini, Central European University
Date: Wednesday, November 24, 2010, 5 PM
If one were to enumerate the most influential and universal social behaviors
in human societies, gossip would undoubtedly be one of them. Exchanging
social information is fundamental for partner selection, social control,
coalition formation, but it also plays a role in social comparison and group
cohesion, just to name some of its main functions. The most frequent topics
of human conversations are other people’s reputation, actions, choices, and
attitudes.
In this talk I will claim that, far from being mere idle-talk, gossiping is
a socially complex activity people intentionally engage in because of what
they believe about others and how they want others to behave. I will then
present a cognitive theory of gossip and reputation in order to point out
that choosing an addressee, selecting the topic and deciding whether and how
to give a specific information are actions pursued according to individuals'
beliefs and goals. Finally, I will try to show the complex interplay between
the micro-level of agents' motivations and the macro-level of collective
behaviors by presenting some results from experimental studies within the
framework of Agent-Based Social Simulation (ABSS). In this computational
approach, social phenomena may emerge as a result of interactions among
heterogeneous artificial agents endowed with internal representations of
themselves, their peers and their environment.
*
The causes of social
essentialism<http://www.ceu.hu/events/2010-11-29/the-causes-of-social-essentialism>
*
Gil Diesendruck, Bar-Ilan University
Date: ***MONDAY***, November 29, 2010, 5 PM
Adults and children around the world seem to treat categories of people as
if they have distinct inherent essences, which make the categories
incompatible and permanent. In this talk, I will examine some of the factors
that may contribute to the development of such essentialist beliefs about
social categories. In particular, I will present data from a recent
developmental cross-cultural study on children's social categorization. I
will then discuss some ideas about the nature and origins of these beliefs,
and describe cultural practices that may help sustain them. I will end with
speculations about the possible adaptive function of such beliefs.
*
Cultural and individual differences in visual
cognition<http://www.ceu.hu/events/2010-12-01/cultural-and-individual-differences-in-visual-cognition>
*
Davie Yoon, Stanford University
Date: Wednesday, December 1, 2010, 5 PM
Where do our practices of interpreting and attending to the visual world
come from? In this talk, I will discuss two lines of research that address
this broad question in different ways. In the first project, I will describe
young children's (3 to 5-year-olds) striking deficit in recognizing two-tone
/ Mooney-type images. These images are trivial for adults to recognize with
a sufficient cue, such as the original photograph from which the two-tone
was derived. We also find that adults from a remote Amazonian tribe (Piraha)
show a similar deficit, and that when the need to comprehend the referential
relationship between the two-tone and photos is removed, children's
recognition improves. This suggests the phenomenon is related to visual
symbolic expertise (c.f., DeLoache), rather than the consequence of an
immature visual system. In a separate line of research, I will discuss
individual differences in viewing an important social stimulus: the human
face. We measured participants' self-reported degree of autism-associated
traits, and also collected eye-tracking data as they watched a video of a
person speaking under two conditions: (1) gaze directed at the participant,
(2) gaze averted. We found that individual differences in the level of
self-reported autistic-like traits predicted different levels of direct gaze
reciprocation (greater gaze to eye region in the direct vs the averted
condition), perhaps an indication of the importance of nonconscious gaze
mimcry in successful social interactions.
Perceptual foundations of music in newborns
Gábor Háden, BME/MTA
Date: Wednesday, December 8, 2010, 5 PM
The universal prevalence of music in human cultures strongly suggests that
music is deeply rooted in the perceptual and cognitive processes of the
human species. In contrast to some assumptions related to speech perception,
the processes underlying music perception are probably no specific to music.
Music perception can be seen as the product of interactions between innate
predispositions, environmental constraints, and learning. Finding out which
of the abilities underlying the perception of music are functional at the
time of birth can help to disentangle these interactions.
In this talk, I will present four studies investigating neonatal abilities
underlying the perception of musical pitch, timbre and rhythm. By applying
ERP measurements, sources of information otherwise hidden by the limited
repertoire of behavioral responses available to newborns can be tapped. I
conclude that babies are born well equipped for gathering information
necessary for music perception, with adult-like abilities .
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