Dear All, The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk. Speaker: Thibaud Gruber<https://www.unige.ch/fapse/eccePAN/fr/team/thibaud-gruber> <https://www.unige.ch/cisa/center/members/gruber-thibaud/> Title: An affective, behavioral and cognitive story of the evolution of communication and culture in humans and other great apes The studies of the evolution of language and culture are intertwined. Often, the same mechanisms – including the usual suspects such as imitation – are argued to be at the heart of the evolution of both. In addition, in the last decades, research on social learning in non-humans vs humans has largely focused on behavioral and cognitive processes, while research on non-human vs human communication has often opposed cognitive processes to emotional ones. These two approaches sometimes fall in the pitfall of looking for the one characteristic that makes us unique amongst other animals. In this talk, I want to focus on the commonalities between animal and human social learning, with the goal to braid together literature from social learning, affective development, and the evolution of communication. All three domains can be unified in an ABC model of social learning, which aims to provide a combined Affective, Behavioral and Cognitive approach to the acquisition of knowledge in a broad sense. Affect, for example through motivation or emotions, indeed colors our quest for knowledge and for knowledge transmission. I will rediscuss classic examples of the animal literature such as the vervet alarm call system or the acquisition of tool use in chimpanzees. The ABC framework also allows introducing continuity between so-called simple and complex cognitive processes, which makes it a more realistic pathway for their attribution to animals or non-verbal infants. As such it opens new avenues of research to resolve the debates on the evolution of communication and culture, particularly in our lineage. Thibaud Gruber is a primatologist and a comparative psychologist whose has been working over 15 years on the topics of the evolution of culture and communication in great apes and humans. After a Master in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, he pursued a PhD in Psychology at the University of St Andrews, UK in 2011. He then obtained his Habilitation in Cognitive Sciences at the ENS, Paris, in 2018. He has held postdoctoral research positions at the University of Zürich, Neuchâtel and Geneva, funded by the Fyssen Foundation, the Marie Curie initiative of the European Commission, and the Swiss National Science Foundation. In 2020, thanks to an Eccellenza Fellowship from the SNSF, he has set up his own lab, the eccePAN lab (Ecology, Cognition, Communication, Emotion), at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences, at the University of Geneva, with a joint position at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences. Time: 16:00, Thursday, 28 November 2024 Location: Vienna Campus, Quellenstrasse 51, Room : QS D-002 Tiered Zoom: Meeting ID: 984 1754 5209<https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98417545209?pwd=909i0Oc5aydidvanERaSfHkbKzEZmh.1> Passcode: 041432 Hosts: Thomas Ganzetti and Günther Knoblich Best regards, Andi ______________________________________________ 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, The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk: Speaker: Neil Cohn<https://www.visuallanguagelab.com/neilcohn>hn>, Visual Language Lab, Department of Communication and Cognition, Tilburg University Title: Reimagining language in multimodal paradigm For over a century, language has been considered as an amodal and arbitrary system with a primary modality of speech. Yet, as argued in our book A Multimodal Language Faculty (Cohn & Schilperoord 2024), this conception of language cannot account for many of the basic observations revealed in the past decades of language research, particularly the growing recognition of the importance of multimodality. I will present a multimodal model of language that accounts for all unimodal behaviors across the vocal, bodily, and graphic modalities along with their multimodal combinations. This “grand unified” model directly allows for semiotic promiscuity across iconicity, indexicality, and symbolicity, while warranting new understandings of linguistic innateness, relativity, universals, and evolution. Altogether, this approach heralds a shift to a Multimodal Paradigm of the language sciences, re-imagining both its cognitive faculty and the notion of “language” itself. Time: 16:00, Wednesday, 5 March 2025 Location: Vienna Campus, Quellenstrasse 51, Room : QS D-001 Tiered Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93986062237?pwd=QlQGy8LaHaNuqbMkbru6eBjj4PMRhs.1 Meeting ID: 939 8606 2237 Passcode: 701950 Hosts: Xueyi Yao and Eva Wittenberg Best regards, Andi ______________________________________________ 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, The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Social Mind Center cordially invites you to the following talk: Speaker: Cristina Baus<https://webgrec.ub.edu/webpages/000014/ang/cbaus.ub.edu.html>ml>, Department of Cognition, Development and Educational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology, University of Barcelona Title: TOGETHER: Mechanisms of lexical alignment in conversation In this talk, I will present research on language interaction, focusing on how interlocutors—whether human or artificial—tend to co-represent their lexical choices during communication. This phenomenon, known as lexical alignment, reflects deep-seated mechanisms that support successful dialogue. Through a series of experiments, I will explore both behavioral and neural processes that underlie lexical co-representation, examining how individuals mentally represent and adapt to each other’s word choices in real time. Using joint language paradigms, I will share findings on two areas: 1. The Nature of Co-representations Across Processing Levels. Investigating how lexical alignment operates across levels of language processing and exploring its impact on memory, particularly the emergence of joint memory effects. 2. The Automaticity of Lexical Alignment. Assessing how alignment occurs spontaneously in diverse communicative settings, such as human-robot interactions and multilingual dialogues with foreign-accented interlocutors. Together, these insights contribute to our understanding of how language users—human or artificial—collaboratively shape meaning through adaptive communication strategies. Time: 16:00, Wednesday, April 30th, 2025 Location: Vienna Campus, Quellenstrasse 51, Room : QS D-002 Tiered Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/98247261997?pwd=S2fIgFkRX1aOw6Q3YgxxmSNRfzLkKf.1 Meeting ID: 982 4726 1997 Passcode: 308782 Host: Alper Demircan Best regards, Andi ______________________________________________ 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, The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk: Speaker: Simone Shamay-Tsoory<https://sans.hevra.haifa.ac.il/home>, Department of Psychology, University of Haifa Title: Inter-Brain Plasticity Underlies the Development of Social Connectedness Abstract: In recent years, inter-brain synchrony has been increasingly recognized as a fundamental mechanism underlying various forms of social connectedness during interactions. In a recent study using functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) we demonstrated that inter-brain synchrony between clients and psychotherapists dynamically changes in the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) over the course of psychotherapy. However, it remains unclear whether inter-brain synchrony can be actively trained and whether such training translates into increased social connectedness and empathy. To address this question, we developed a dyadic neurofeedback platform using fNIRS to provide real-time feedback targeting the IFG. Ninety-two participants were randomly assigned into dyads and allocated to either an experimental group or a control group. The training consisted of three sessions over one week. Results revealed that ratings of social connectedness increased more steeply in the experimental group compared to the control group. Crucially, a significant group-by-session interaction was observed in the IFG, such that the experimental group exhibited a progressive increase in IFG synchrony relative to baseline across sessions, whereas the control group showed no significant change in inter-brain synchrony. This evidence advances our understanding of inter-brain plasticity and highlights its potential applications in fostering socio-emotional well-being. Time: 16:00, Wednesday, 11 March 2026 Location: online only Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/96695073643?pwd=mYR3gKcoyE4lFo9H5gMipaKkruBJW5.1 Meeting ID: 966 9507 3643 Passcode: 049214 Host: Natalie Sebanz Best regards, Andi ______________________________________________ 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