Center for Cognitive Science
The Puzzle of the Mind
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Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
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Last Update: 24 November 2008
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in
and are open to the public.
To receive email announcements of each event, please subscribe to our Listserv mailing lists.
Background readings for each lecture are available to UB faculty and students on UB Learns. Once you have logged in to UB Learns, select "Center for Cognitive Science", then "Course Documents", then "Background Readings for Fall 2008 Colloquium Series". (Or you can link directly to the background readings.)
If you are affiliated with UB and do not have access to our UBLearns website, please contact Gail Mauner, mauner@buffalo.edu.
August 27
Meeting of undergraduate CogSci majors with CCS Director
September 3
Business Meeting
All CogSci faculty members should attend.
September 10
Behavioral Neuroscience Area Head
UB Department of Psychology
Tutorial on Principles of Learning
(Learning Research Group, First Meeting)
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
September 17
Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Computer Science, & the Center for Visual Science
University of Rochester
Optimal Learning in Perception and Action
ABSTRACT:
When studying human behavior, it is often useful to compare this behavior with the optimal behavior of an agent that has access to all relevant information, has infinite computational resources, and reasons in a rational manner. If people behave in an optimal manner, we can conclude that people are behaving as they do because they are efficiently using all information to maximize performance on a task. If people behave sub-optimally, we can attempt to identify the constraints or limitations responsible for sub-optimal performance. In this talk, we'll describe three projects using this optimality framework to examine human performance on motor and visual tasks. The first project studies human adaptive motor control under different noise conditions. The second project studies plans for motor movements expressed as optimal linear combinations of optimal motor primitives. The third project studies human information integration in a visual classification task.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
September 24
Department of Pharmacy Administration
University of Illinois at Chicago
Auditory Perception of Drug Names:
Effects of Noise,
Similarity, Frequency and Familiarity
ABSTRACT:
Medication errors are a well known threat to patient safety. Among medication errors, confusions between drug names that look and sound alike continues to be a source of concern. One factor that might make errors more likely is when prescribing is done via spoken communication in a noisy environment. Using the neighborhood activation model of word perception as a theoretical framework, I will discuss the results of a study investigating the effect of noise, familiarity, prescribing frequency, frequency-weighted neighborhood probability (FWNP), and phonotactic features on auditory perception of drug names when physicians, pharmacists, nurses, and lay people are asked to recognize drug names. In particular, this study examined whether noise would reduce accuracy, while familiarity, prescribing frequency, FWNP, and sublexical frequency would enhance recognizing drug names. We found that accuracy was influenced by the similarity neighborhood of each drug name and, importantly, that it decreased as noise increased, and that familiar drug names were perceived more accurately than less familiar drug names, although there were some differences across participant groups. Recommendations for reducing errors will be discussed.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
October 1
Departments of Linguistics and Philosophy
University of Maryland
Meanings:
What Are They, and What Are They Good For?
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I'll offer a version of the old idea that meanings are instructions to build concepts. The proposal draws on work by Frege and Chomsky, along with many other philosophers and linguists. Frege showed us how expressions of an invented language (used by scientists) might be viewed as "recipes" for constructing concepts, including formally new "atomic" concepts that can be introduced by means of fruitful definitions. Chomsky showed us how expressions of a natural language (acquirable by children) might be viewed as outputs of an instantiated procedure for generating instructions to cognitive systems that "interface with" the human language faculty. We can use Chomsky's notion of an I-language to describe a corresponding notion of an I-concept: a concept that can be constructed by executing the semantic instruction provided by an expression of an I-language. Then we can say that the meaning of an I-language expression is an instruction to create an I-concept. As we'll see, this general idea is compatible with various views about lexicalization and the significance of combining words to form phrases. But given some empirically motivated assumptions about the significance of combining words, there are some interesting consequences for lexicalization. Many contemporary researchers adopt, at least as an idealization, an old picture of lexicalizing as a cognitively conservative process of labeling a concept with some grammatical information. But if meanings are instructions to construct I-concepts, we probably need a neo-Fregean model according to which lexicalization can be a cognitively creative process of abstraction, in which already existing concepts (that humans may well share with other animals) are paired with analytically related I-concepts that may be formally new. From this perspective, meanings and I-languages may have more to do with reorganizing conceptual space—and less to do with communication—than many current theories suggest.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
October 8
No meeting
October 15
Learning Initiative Research Group:
First Meeting
The meeting will take place at Gail Mauner and David Braun's house at 7 pm. A main dish will be provided, but we would like attendees to provide an appetizer, salad, appetizer, or beverage.
R.S.V.P. mauner@buffalo.edu to indicate what you are bringing and to get address and directions.
All faculty, whether Center members or not, are invited. Interested students and other individuals should contact Gail Mauner, mauner@buffalo.edu, to learn about follow-up activities.
Penn, D. & Povinelli, D. (2007), "Causal Cognition in Human and Nonhuman Animals: A Comparative, Critical Review", Annual Review of Psychology 58: 97-118.
Accessible from UB Libraries Electronic Journal Holdings or directly by clicking on the title, above, or on UBLearns
ABSTRACT:
In this article, we review some of the most provocative experimental results to have emerged from comparative labs in the past few years, starting with research focusing on contingency learning and finishing with experiments exploring nonhuman animals' understanding of causal-logical relations. Although the theoretical explanation for these results is often inchoate, a clear pattern nevertheless emerges. The comparative evidence does not fit comfortably into either the traditional associationist or inferential alternatives that have dominated comparative debate for many decades now. Indeed, the similarities and differences between human and nonhuman causal cognition seem to be much more multifarious than these dichotomous alternatives allow.
October 22
Lexicon Initiative Research Group:
First Meeting
For the first meeting of the Lexicon Research Group, we will be discussing two papers and some possible directions for multi-investigator funding. The discussion will be led by Paul Luce and Gail Mauner.
This meeting is for faculty only. All faculty, whether Center members or not, are invited. Interested students and other individuals should contact Gail Mauner, mauner@buffalo.edu, to learn about follow-up activities.
One of the papers we will discuss focuses primarily on lexical form, while the other concentrates on lexical content. These papers are:
These papers can be downloaded using the links above or from the Center for Cognitive Science UB Learns website if you are a Center member. See instructions at the top of this page.
October 29
Departments of Neurology, of Psychology, of Psychiatry,
and of Counseling, School, and Educational Psychology
University at Buffalo
Cerebral Lesions and Atrophy
Influence Cognition and Personality
in Multiple Sclerosis
ABSTRACT:
Multiple sclerosis (MS) is an inflammatory, immunological disorder of the CNS affecting roughly 500,000 persons in the US. The pathological hallmark of MS is demyelination in the cerebral or spinal white matter, which can be easily measured with MRI. The pathology arises in acute attacks or inflammation or "relapses", and the clinical diagnostic criteria emphasize demyelinating lesions that are disseminated in time and space. However, in recent years, the degenerative aspects of the disease have been more appreciated. Brain atrophy is also common in MS and is probably more important with regard to clinical parameters. Thus, MS is both an inflammatory and a degenerative disease. Roughly 50-60% of MS patients are cognitively impaired, and more are affected psychiatrically. The cerebral pathology of MS is heterogeneous, and clinical presentation varies considerably from patient to patient. Much has been learned about the neuropsychology of MS in the past two decades, with the advent of standardized tests for this population and of improved brain imaging. This presentation covers our clinical neuropsychological research in MS and in particular research revealing correlation between cognitive compromise and pathology in specific regions of the brain and specific tissue compartments. Our work demonstrates that (a) processing speed and episodic memory are most commonly affected in MS, (b) atrophy of deep gray matter (e.g., thalamus and caudate) is prominent in MS and strongly related to cognitive decline, (c) cerebral reorganization/compensation processes as measured by PET and fMRI probably account for the imperfect correlation between structural MRI and cognition, and (d) the cerebral pathology of MS also contributes to neuropsychiatric disorders and subtle personality changes. I will conclude with a brief summary of our planned work in the hope of fostering communication within the UB community network and encouraging collaboration across disciplines.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
November 5
Department of Computer Science
University of Toronto
Semantic-Distance Measures
with Distributional Profiles
of Coarse-Grained Concepts
ABSTRACT:
Although semantic-distance measures are applied to words in textual tasks such as building lexical chains, semantic distance is really a property of concepts, not words. We present a hybrid measure of semantic distance based on distributional profiles of concepts that we infer from text corpora. We use only a very coarse-grained inventory of concepts—each category of a published thesaurus is taken as a single concept—and yet obtain results on basic semantic-distance tasks that are generally as good as methods that use fine-grained, word-based measures. Because the measure is based on naturally occurring text, it is able to find word pairs that stand in non-classical relationships not found in WordNet. It can be applied cross-lingually, using a thesaurus in one language to measure semantic distance between words in another. In addition, it can used to determine the degree of antonymy between words. (Work done in association with Saif Mohammad, Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland.)
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Computer Science & Engineering
November 12
Department of Psychology
Director of IGERT Language and Communication Program
Director of Institute for Research in Cognitive Science
University of Pennsylvania
Attention Allocation during Event Perception:
Does Language Matter?
ABSTRACT:
What role does language play in attention allocation during event perception? What role does it play in remembering events? I will present the results from a series of eye-tracking studies in which participants (N = 40) viewed simple animated motion events that contained both a manner of motion (e.g., skating) and an endpoint path (approaching a snowman). Half of the participants were native speakers of Greek, a language that tends to describe motion as goal-directed paths (approaching), and half were native speakers of English, which prefers manner/instruments (skating). Participants were assigned to a range of tasks, including: describing each event, passively studying each event, studying while engaged in a linguistic interference task, and studying while engaged in a nonlinguistic interference task. The results reveal strong differences in attention allocation among language groups when language was available as an encoding strategy. I will discuss the implications for event representation and encoding. (This work is done in collaboration with Assistant Professor Anna Papafragou from the University of Delaware.)
Suggested reading:
Papafragou, A.; Hulbert, J.; & Trueswell, J.C. (2008), "Does Language Guide Event Perception? Evidence from Eye Movements", Cognition 108(1): 155-184.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
November 19
Patrizia Tabossi
Department of Psychology
University of Trieste (Italy)
Recognition and Processing of Idiomatic Expressions
ABSTRACT:
Idioms are fixed expressions whose meaning is not a function of their constituents and whose syntax is defective. Given people's propensity to "speak idiomatically unless there is a good reason not to do so" (Searle 1975), explaining how these expressions are mentally represented, recognised in their standard form, and syntactically processed is a central issue for any theory of language use. In the talk, alternative models of how idioms are recognized and of how speakers deal with their syntax will be discussed, and a model of their recognition and processing will be proposed.
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
November 16 -- Thanksgiving break -- no meeting
December 3
Department of Psychology
University of Vermont
Context, Extinction, and Relapse
ABSTRACT:
Extinction is a basic behavioral phenomenon that allows us to adapt to a changing environment. It is also a procedure that is used in clinical settings to help eliminate maladaptive thoughts, emotions, and behaviors. However, basic laboratory research indicates that extinction does not erase the original learning, but instead creates new learning that is highly dependent on the context for retrieval. This talk will discuss some implications for understanding lapse and relapse (e.g., of anxiety disorders and substance abuse), and will present recent laboratory research designed to evaluate various behavioral and drug treatments that might encourage more permanent behavior change.
Background readings:
Background readings online at UB Learns. See instructions at the top of this page.
Co-sponsored by the Tremaine Fund of the Department of Psychology
December 10
Department of Psychology
Canada Research Chair, Cognitive Neuropsychology of Performance
McGill University
Music Performance:
When It Takes Two to Tango
ABSTRACT:
Auditory behaviors like music and speech are essentially group activities
(unless one is entertaining oneself). Most models of cognitive processes
are constrained to individual behavior, based on studies that measure
auditory behaviors in isolation (sometimes in concert with a computer or a
metronome). I will describe studies of individual and group behavior by
musicians in terms of their motor activity and their reactions to auditory
events. By manipulating the roles that performers take and the sensory
feedback they experience, we measure how the goal of coordinating one's
behavior with others affects the timing and motion of individuals'
performance. Not surprisingly, scaling up to group behavior requires
adjustment of typical cognitive paradigms and conceptual frameworks.
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