The Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the public defense of the PhD thesis Gaming epistemic vigilance by Ákos Szegőfi Friday, SepteMber 12, 1 P.M. CET Room D001 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Join Zoom Meeting https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/94841744072?pwd=5TjG609NPoVWrKpXLGhzb4W1Late6W.1&… Meeting ID: 948 4174 4072 Passcode: 229483 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Christophe Heintz (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: György Gergely (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Eva Wittenberg, Chair, CEU Professor Joe Stubbersfield<https://www.winchester.ac.uk/about-us/leadership-and-governance/staff-directory/staff-profiles/stubbersfield.php>, External examiner, Senior Lecturer in Psychology, University of Winchester Professor Jon Roozenbeek<https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/staff/dr-jon-roozenbeek> , External examiner, Affiliate Lecturer in Psychology, University of Cambridge *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/U3c68ucUt8> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |How dangerous are misinformation and disinformation? What effects do they have on beliefs and behaviour, and how can we defend against them? In recent years, two schools of thought have emerged to address these questions. The first school views misinformation and disinformation as extremely dangerous, arguing that humans are overly gullible or lazy when evaluating communicated information, making them vulnerable to deception. The solution is to enhance people's cognitive abilities and motivation. The second school holds that humans are epistemically vigilant, misinformation is not a new problem, and has been dealt with throughout history. According to this view, the solutions proposed by the first school have unintended consequences: they can lead people to overestimate the prevalence of inaccurate beliefs in others, triggering widespread panic about technology and increase social polarization. This dissertation seeks to bridge these two schools of thought by demonstrating how even epistemically vigilant agents can be deceived through various methods. It then explores how modern communication environments enable the widespread use of these methods and proposes structural solutions that focus on reshaping these environments rather than attempting to "upgrade" human cognition. "Gaming" epistemic vigilance cuts both ways: epistemic vigilance can be manipulated malevolently, but it can also be aided through re-structuring communication environments in a way how they would foster the optimal usage of existing cognitive capacities. The dissertation begins with a literature review that outlines the two schools of thought and the contribution of this research. Chapters 1 and 2 present experimental studies that test two disinformation methods, documenting their effectiveness. Chapter 3 and 4 analyses the cultural evolution and usage of the "blood libel" conspiracy theory in modern communication environments. Chapter 5 offers a theoretical overview of the history of communication environments, exploring how structural solutions have been implemented to address misinformation. Finally, Chapter 6 and 7 present two experiments using social media simulations to test the effectiveness of source-rating systems in combating misinformation. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC1C20.23452EE0] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC1C20.23452EE0] 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 THE ACQUISITION OF PLURAL EXPRESSIONS How children learn to navigate the logical space in the realm of pluralities by Magdalena Roszkowski wednesday, SepteMber 10, 3 P.M. CET Room D001 (CEU, Quellenstrasse 51, 1100 Vienna) Join Zoom Meeting https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98601131162?pwd=20mWML3KBxeyyJr0ksgSYy00O7R5dl.1&… Meeting ID: 986 0113 1162 Passcode: 010834 PRIMARY SUPERVISOR: Ernő Téglás (CEU) SECONDARY SUPERVISOR: György Gergely (CEU) Members of the Dissertation Committee: Natalie Sebanz, Chair, CEU Athulya Aravind<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=pBeuruUAAAAJ&hl=en…;hl=en>, External examiner, Associate Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Yale University. Jean-Remy Hochmann<https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=IciVLb4AAAAJ&hl=d…;hl=de>, External examiner, Professor, CNRS researcher at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in Lyon *Anyone not affiliated with CEU wishing to attend in-person in Vienna must RSVP here<https://forms.office.com/e/58fW2Sn2PU> to get access to the lecture hall. ABSTRACT |A longstanding and ever-fascinating puzzle is how children acquire language so rapidly and seemingly effortlessly, raising questions about the cognitive prerequisites that enable this process and the expectations that guide it. This dissertation investigates the acquisition of various constructions that involve plural expressions and the related notions of distributivity and cumulativity as well as homogeneity and (non-)maximality. It explores questions concerning children's early representational capacities, the relationship between linguistic representations and conceptual development and principles that support the mapping between language and the world. Specifically, it asks how children come to form complex semantic representations, which expectations about meaning they bring to the learning task and how the acquisition of expressions that encode plurality relates to more general abilities of reasoning about multitudes. The first part examines how children acquire abstract meaning representations in the domain of pluralities and addresses some fundamental questions regarding the acquisition of functional elements. By using a structural priming paradigm we investigate whether preschoolaged children are able to represent cumulative and distributive meanings of ambiguous plural sentences, even before they have mastered the truth-conditions of distributive universal quantifiers. The findings reveal priming effects for both cumulative and distributive interpretations in the absence of overt disambiguating elements, suggesting that children may have available certain logical representations prior to showing adult-like competence with the corresponding lexical items. The second part focuses on the relationship between language and thought and explores the possibility that the conceptual repertoire relevant for quantification is available at an early age. In particular, we investigate whether already preverbal infants are able to deploy the concept of exhaustivity, a notion that may later play a role in the acquisition of universal quantifiers. We present an eye-tracking study which involves a task that allows infants to learn a rule based on the quantificational properties of scenes featuring multiple agents. The results of this inquiry are inconclusive, leaving the question open of whether the concept of exhaustivity is available preverbally. The third part studies how children navigate uncertainty in the application of linguistic expressions. We examine how preschoolers interpret definite singular and plural expressions in scenarios that involve non-maximal and heterogeneous referents through a truth-value judgment task. The findings show that children are receptive to both types of violations, indicating an early sensitivity to the vague nature of language and gaps in the extension of natural language expressions. Taken together the results provide evidence for an early ability to form complex semantic representations and to deal with the uncertainty accompanying linguistic expressions, while also pointing to potential differences between linguistic and non-linguistic representations. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Hosted by the Department of Cognitive Science [cid:image001.png@01DC20D0.B97485A0] ------------------------------------------------------------------------ GyörgyNÉ Finta (Réka) Department Coordinator Department of cognitive SCience --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [cid:image002.jpg@01DC20D0.B97485A0] 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