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 . _______________________________________________ Subscribe/Unsubscribe at http://cdc.ceu.hu/mailman/listinfo/seminars