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Fall 2009 Colloquia

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 2009 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.

2 September 2009

Orientation Meeting for Undergraduate and Graduate Cog Sci Students

9 September 2009

Business Meeting for Faculty Members of the Center

16 September 2009

Victor Ferreira

Department of Psychology
University of California, San Diego

What Speakers Do and Don't Do to Successfully Communicate

ABSTRACT:

Accumulating evidence in the cognitive and linguistic sciences suggests that people are often near-optimal actors, being exquisitely tuned to the world around them. In contrast, I describe a range of observations indicating that, when producing language, speakers are notably suboptimal and insensitive to many important features of their linguistic expressions and communicative environments. For example, speakers produce words based on factors other than what they mean, they sometimes choose descriptions that ignore what their addressees do and do not know and that violate their own communicative goals, and they are largely insensitive to the linguistic ambiguity of their utterances. These insensitivities arise at least partly because speakers are responsive to their own cognitive needs: They choose words and sentence structures that are readily accessible, and choose descriptions referring to features that draw their attention. I argue that speakers' productions show sensitivity to their own needs like this because producing language is hard—especially, it's harder than understanding language. As such, it is not speakers who are optimally tuned to their environment, but speakers and hearers together, each making up for the challenges of the other, who exhibit a division of labor for communicative success.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Ferriera, Victor S. (2009), "Ambiguity, Accessibility, and a Division of Labor for Communicative Success" (unpublished ms.).

23 September 2009

Stephani Foraker

Department of Psychology
Buffalo State College

Who Are You Talking About?
How Prominence Helps Understanding

ABSTRACT:

Understanding dependencies in language, including that between a pronoun and its antecedent, relies on memory, since listeners and readers need access to previously encountered information. Previous research shows that a pronoun referring back to a prominent antecedent is easier to resolve than when the antecedent is not prominent. I will present experiments testing two possible cognitive mechanisms underlying this advantage. Results indicate that prominence facilitates pronoun resolution by increasing the distinctiveness of antecedent representations in memory, thereby facilitating retrieval, rather than by prompting active maintenance of a prominent entity in focal attention.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Foraker, Stephani; & McElree, Brian (2007), "The Role of Prominence in Pronoun Resolution: Active versus Passive Representations", Journal of Memory and Language 56: 357–383.

30 September 2009

Research Group Meetings

7 October 2009

Christine Gunlogson

Department of Linguistics
and Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester

The Qualities of Quality

ABSTRACT:

In this talk, I will be concerned with general principles governing the relationship between what speakers say and what they are taken by their interlocutors to believe. My starting point is Grice's maxim of Quality ("Try to make your contribution one that is true"), which is standardly assumed to underlie implications about the speaker's propositional attitude toward the content of her contribution. If the speaker is meeting the demands of Quality, as interlocutors normally presume, then addressees can infer that the speaker believes what she is saying and (believes she) has sufficient evidence for it.

Although this standard picture has much to recommend it, it has long been recognized that Quality operates somewhat differently than the other maxims, with Grice himself being the first to remark on its exceptional nature. I will focus on the differences in the first part of the talk, summarizing and adding to the existing set of observations about its special character. The conclusion is that Quality is not just an unusual sort of maxim, it is a different sort of beast altogether. In the second part of the talk, I translate the observations into a set of requirements for the implementation of Quality, and propose to meet the requirements by modeling relations between the discourse situation (which includes the states of the interlocutors) and the situation described by the discourse content.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Grice, H. Paul (1989), Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), especially "Logic and Conversation" and "Further Notes on Logic and Conversation".

14 October 2009

J. Paul Minda

Department of Psychology
University of Western Ontario

Verbal and Nonverbal Approaches to Category Learning

ABSTRACT:

Categories are learned in a variety of ways, and one important distinction concerns the effects of verbal and nonverbal processing on category learning. For example, when a physician offers a diagnosis to a sick patient, he or she is classifying that patient into a known disease category. The diagnosis can be made on the basis of symptom lists but is also affected by memories for similar patients. Selecting symptoms and applying rules is a verbally-mediated process, whereas calculating or assessing the similarity of the patient to memories of previous patients is a nonverbal process. Many factors likely influence the relative balance of these processes, and different categories probably rely on a different balance of these two processes. In this talk, I outline a general theory of verbal and nonverbal category learning. I argue that verbal category learning relies on working memory and is primarily involved in rule-based categorization. Nonverbal category learning may rely on visual working memory and is primarily involved in similarity-based categorization. I present the results of several studies from my lab that test many of the predictions from this theory. Although we do not argue for two completely independent learning systems, we argue that the available evidence strongly supports the existence of these two approaches to learning categories.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Minda, John Paul; & Miles, Sarah J. (209, in press), "The Influence of Verbal and Nonverbal Processing on Category Learning", in B.H. Ross (ed.), The Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 52 (New York, NY: Academic Press).

21 October 2009

NOTE: This talk will take place in the Center for the Arts Screening Room

Henry L. Roediger III

James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor
Dean of Academic Planning in Arts and Sciences
Department of Psychology Memory Lab
Washington University

LAW and COGNITIVE SCIENCE SPEAKER
Co-Sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy

Illusory Memories and Their Implications

ABSTRACT:

The two great errors of memory are trying to retrieve an event with nothing coming to mind (forgetting) and trying to retrieve a memory with the wrong target coming to mind and being accepted as correct (false or illusory memories). The careful study of forgetting was begun in 1885 and continues to this day. However, the systematic study of illusory memories has been carried out for only the past few decades. My talk will review several important situations and factors that are known to give rise to illusions of memory. Somewhat surprisingly, factors that often promote accurate retention can, in somewhat different situations, lead to illusory memories. The fact that memories are malleable has important implications for education, law, medicine, and other fields.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Roediger, Henry L.; & McDermott, Kathleen B. (2000), "Distortions of Memory", in Endel Tulving & Fergus I.M. Craik (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press): 149–162.

28 October 2009

David Braun

Professor and Patrick & Edna J. Romanell Chair
Department of Philosophy
University at Buffalo

Knowing How and Knowing Answers

ABSTRACT:

I know how to drive my car. I also know many propositions about how to drive my car: I know, for instance, that I can start my car by turning its key in its ignition and that I can steer my car right by turning its steering wheel clockwise. My propositional knowledge obviously plays an important role in my knowledge of how to drive my car. Could my knowing how to drive my car simply consist in my knowing propositions? Propositionalism (as I shall use the term) is roughly the view that knowing how to G (for any G) reduces to propositional knowledge. I present and motivate a particular version of Propositionalism in this paper, thereby following previous advocates of Propositionalism, such as Carl Ginet (1975) and Jason Stanley and Timothy Williams (2001). I then describe how our intuitions about knows-how-to ascriptions vary from context to context. I use this discussion to reply to several objections to my version of Propositionalism.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Braun, David (2009), "Knowing How and Knowing Answers" (unpublished ms.)

4 November 2009

Research Group Meetings

11 November 2009

Barbara Spellman

Department of Psychology
University of Virginia

LAW and COGNITIVE SCIENCE SPEAKER
Co-Sponsored by the Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy

(Re-)Considering Confidence

ABSTRACT:

There is extensive behavioral research showing that people rely heavily on an informant's demeanor and confidence when evaluating that informant's credibility—despite the equally extensive research showing that often confidence is not well correlated with accuracy. Thus, relying on confidence as a proxy can lead to significant errors in trial outcomes. I will show that information about an informant's calibration—whether that person really is a good judge of what he knows and what he doesn't know—trumps confidence when evaluating credibility. I will also describe work showing how people differently treat information that is equally likely to be mistaken but for dissimilar reasons (either ignorance or intentional deception). These findings have implications for various rules of evidence.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Tenney, E.; MacCoun, R.; Spellman, B.; & Hastie, R. (2007), "Calibration Trumps Confidence as a Basis for Witness Credibility", Psychological Science 18(1): 46–50.

Spellman, B.; & Tenney, E. (2009), "Credible Testimony in and out of Court", (unpublished ms.).

18 November 2009

Gary S. Dell

Cognitive Science Group
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Implicit Learning in the Language Production System
as Revealed by Speech Errors:
Some Studies within an Emerging Framework in Psycholinguistics

ABSTRACT:

First, I'll describe a general framework for psycholinguistic research that emphasizes the interrelations among language comprehension, production, and acquisition. Then I'll present data from experiments that exemplify this framework involving the learning of artificial phonotactic-like constraints in the laboratory. One of the interesting features of this learning is that it is expressed in patterns of phonological speech errors. Another is that some patterns are learned extremely quickly, some quite slowly, and some not at all.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Dell, Gary S.; Reed, Kristopher D.; Adams, David R.; & Meyer, Antje S. (2000), "Speech Errors, Phonotactic Constraints, and Implicit Learning: A Study of the Role of Experience in Language Production", Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 26(6): 1355–1367.

25 November 2009

Thanksgiving Break—no meeting

2 December 2009

Stuart C. Shapiro

Department of Computer Science and Engineering
University at Buffalo

The GLAIR Cognitive Architecture and Prospects for Consciousness

ABSTRACT:

GLAIR (Grounded Layered Architecture with Integrated Reasoning) is a multi-layered cognitive architecture for embodied agents operating in real, virtual, or simulated environments containing other agents. The highest layer of the GLAIR architecture, the Knowledge Layer (KL), contains the beliefs of the agent, including beliefs about itself, and is the layer in which conscious reasoning, planning, and act selection are performed. The lowest layer of the GLAIR architecture, the Sensori-Actuator Layer (SAL), contains the controllers of the sensors and effectors of the hardware or software robot. Between the KL and the SAL is the Perceptuo-Motor Layer (PML), which grounds the KL symbols in perceptual structures and subconscious actions, contains deictic and modality registers for providing the agent's sense of embodiment and of situatedness in the environment, and handles translation and communication between the KL and the SAL. I will discuss the GLAIR architecture, present an example of a GLAIR-based agent, and speculate about whether the agent's self-model, perceptual grounding of KL symbols, and the deictic and modality registers give the agent qualia and consciousness.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Shapiro, Stuart C.; & Bona, Jonathan P. (2009), "The GLAIR Cognitive Architecture", in Alexei Samsonovich (Ed.), Biologically Inspired Cognitive Architectures—II: Papers from the AAAI Fall Symposium, Technical Report FS-09-01 (Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press): 141–152.

9 December 2009

Kristi A. Buckley

Center for Hearing & Deafness
Department of Communicative Disorders & Sciences
University at Buffalo

Make Up Your Mind!
Cross-Modal Plasticity and Sensory Recovery

ABSTRACT:

Cross-modal reorganization of the brain as a result of sensory deprivation is well documented. For example, in individuals with early-onset blindness, the occipital cortex has been shown to respond to somatosensory input during Braille reading. Individuals with congenital deafness have been shown to process peripheral visual motion in areas of the right temporal lobe that respond to sound in normal-hearing individuals. These changes may be beneficial to the affected individuals, such as an increase in peripheral visual field awareness. However, our laboratory has found that if the deprived sense (e.g., hearing) is restored through medical intervention, these cross-modal differences in cortical organization are detrimental to the recovery of the affected sensory system. Cochlear implants provide a unique opportunity to evaluate the influence of cross-modal plasticity on sensory recovery in the auditory system. The long-term objectives in our laboratory are to further understanding of the development of cross-modal plasticity, the limitations it imposes on processing once the sensation of hearing has been restored, the development of cross-modal plasticity targeted therapeutic intervention, and to increase prognostic accuracy in auditorily deprived individuals seeking cochlear implants. Further, lessons learned about cross-modal plasticity in the auditory system have implications for the emerging field of retinal implants.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Kral, Andrej (2007), "Unimodal and Cross-Modal Plasticity in the ‘Deaf’ Auditory Cortex", International Journal of Audiology 46: 479–493.