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: 29 November 2011
Note: |
in
(unless otherwise noted), North Campus,
and are open to the public.
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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" → "Course
Documents" →
"Background Readings for Fall 2011". If you are affiliated
with UB and do not have access to our UBLearns website, please contact
Gail Mauner, mauner@buffalo.edu.
31 August 2011
Meeting with Cognitive Science Students
7 September 2011
Business Meeting
14 September 2011
UB Department of Biochemistry
What's So Memorable about NMDA Receptors?
ABSTRACT:
At the vast majority of synapses in brain, two types of glutamate-activated channels, AMPA and NMDA receptors, generate the excitatory postsynaptic current (epsc). These receptors are highly homologous in primary sequence and 3-D structure, yet each generates characteristic electrical signals and mediates distinct functions in synaptic transmission and plasticity. AMPA receptors serve to faithfully transmit electrical signals, whereas NMDA receptors serve to detect memorable signals and to integrate and relay these as post-synaptic calcium fluxes, in effect initiating synaptic plasticity or apoptosis. The lecture will touch upon recent evidence that links biophysical properties of NMDA receptors to these physiologic functions. In particular, the kinetics of glutamate binding/dissociation, activation mechanism, and gating behavior will be discussed as they relate to synaptic plasticity.
RECOMMENDED READING:
28 September 2011
Co-sponsored by the UB Department of Philosophy
Silver Professor of Philosophy, Psychology, and Neural Sciences
Department of Philosophy
New York University
The Overflow Wars
ABSTRACT:
The overflow argument appeals to variants of iconic memory to argue that a conscious phenomenology system "overflows"—that is, has a higher capacity than—the cognitive access system. Recently, these arguments have come under pressure both empirically and conceptually. At the same time, research on a newly recognized variant of iconic memory has generated exciting findings. This talk assesses the overflow argument in light of these recent contributions.
Brief presentations of stimuli give the perceiver the impression that one can grasp and report only a few of the rich array of objects and their properties that one sees. Sperling showed participants an array of letters (for example 3 rows of 4 letters) for a brief period, finding that subjects could report only 3–4 items from the whole matrix but could also report 3–4 items from any row cued after stimulus offset, suggesting their introspective judgment was correct.
This introspective judgment is part of the basis of an argument for overflow. Many have argued that this introspective judgment stems from a kind of cognitive illusion, what has been called the Refrigerator Light Illusion: that the perceiver confuses easy availability upon attending with presence in the visual field. However, it has recently been claimed that perceivers in this type of experiment are victims of a perceptual rather than cognitive illusion, in which they confuse fragments or features of letters with letters, or confuse generic "gists" perceived with diffuse attention with specific letters with specific attended shapes, or are victims of a "postdictive" illusion, or are victims of "inattentional inflation of subjective perception".
This talk reviews the controversy, arguing that the critics of overflow are committed to unconscious image-like representations, a postulation for which there is no independent evidence.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Block, Ned (2008), "Consciousness and Cognitive Access", Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 108(Part 3):289–317.
5 October 2011
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester
Syntactic Adaptation When Encountering the Unexpected
ABSTRACT:
Many artificial language learning experiments have implicated implicit statistical learning as a feasible mechanism of grammar induction, typically demonstrating that children and adults are able to learn about the underlying structure of sequential input with surprisingly short amounts of exposure to it. In this talk, I will detail the results of a series of experiments highlighting the role that these types of implicit learning mechanisms are likely to play during natural-language processing in adulthood. In all of the experiments to be discussed, subjects encountered distributions of probabilistic cues to syntactic structure that deviated in various ways from the distributions normally encountered in natural language. These deviations produced conditions under which various structural expectations were violated. In each case, subjects exhibited protracted adaptation to the atypical distributions of cue-based information over the course of an experiment, as indexed by cumulative changes in patterns of reaction times elicited in response to expectation violations. This type of short-term learning, which we refer to as syntactic adaptation (Fine, Farmer, & Jaeger (in progress); see also Farmer, Monaghan, Misyak, & Christiansen (in press)) is consistent with accounts of language processing and acquisition that provide for continuous updating of distributional information over time, all the while highlighting the strong interrelationship that exists between processing and learning. The talk will conclude with a discussion of the degree to which the type of learning observed in these experiments is likely to be context-specific versus generalizable, under what conditions it is most likely to occur, and what these types of learning effects mean for current theories of real-time syntactic processing.
RECOMMENDED READING:
12 October 2011
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences,
Center for Language Sciences
University of Rochester
Word Order Universals Reflect Biased Learning
ABSTRACT:
In this talk, I provide evidence for a key assumption of generative linguistics—namely, that biases in the language-learning system constrain the space of possible human languages. Recent claims that typological universals do not exist, or are the result of factors outside the cognitive system, have highlighted the need for experimental evidence connecting learning biases to typological preferences (e.g., Evans & Levinson 2009). I focus on a word-order universal, first formulated by Greenberg (1963), which bans a language from using both pre-nominal adjectives and post-nominal numerals. I report the results of several artificial-language learning experiments showing that learning biases can provide an explanation for this universal.
RECOMMENDED READING:
19 October 2011
Department of Brain & Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester
Neural Basis of Perceptual Learning:
Improved Inference in Early Sensory Areas
ABSTRACT:
Extensive training on simple tasks such as fine orientation discrimination results in large improvements in performance, a form of learning known as Perceptual Learning (PL). Psychophysical experiments manipulating external noise have been used to argue that PL is due to improved decision making. In contrast, single-cell recordings have demonstrated that response properties of neurons in early sensory areas are modified by training, suggesting a change in early sensory representations, not decision making. No model has successfully reconciled these contradictory conclusions. In this talk, considering the example of orientation discrimination, I will argue that specific changes to the feed-forward connectivity between the Lateral Geniculate Nucleus (LGN) and the primary visual cortex (V1) can improve performance in a manner consistent with both psychophysical and neurophsyiological findings. Importantly, the system behaves as if the decision stage has been improved, even though the changes took place early in the model. Further, I will show that the improvement in performance during PL need not be represented by a steepening of tuning curves in early sensory areas—as suggested by previous work. Rather, when learning-induced changes in correlations are taken into account, performance depends crucially on exactly how sensory representations are modified—modifications that improve inference result in improved performance, irrespective of tuning-curve changes.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Bejjanki, V.R.; Beck, J.M.; Lu, Z.L.; Pouget, A. (2011), "Perceptual Learning as Improved Probabilistic Inference in Early Sensory Areas", Nature Neuroscience 14: 642–648.
26 October 2011
Communication Sciences Program
Hunter College (CUNY)
The Resilience of Structure in Talk:
Evidence from Language Acquisition and Language Loss
ABSTRACT:
Within a larger debate in cognitive science, questions about the existence of abstract, structural representations and processes operating independently of specific content have dominated much research in the psycholinguistics of language comprehension, production, and acquisition. In this talk, I approach this question with data from two "limiting cases": language acquisition by young three-year-olds and language loss by older speakers with Alzheimer's Disease (AD). In the first limiting case, I will present data from a syntactic priming experiment with young children, indicating that young, monolingual-English children have more abstract, sentence-level representations than suggested by lexicalist accounts of language acquisition. In the second limiting case, I will present data from a sentence-production task with Italian and English speakers with AD, showing that speakers' knowledge of the fundamental structural properties of their language remains intact even when much else is lost. I will discuss these data within current, theoretical debates in the cognitive neuroscience of language, as well as their implications for language interventions for both children and adults.
RECOMMENDED READING:
9 November 2011
UB Department of Computer Science & Engineering
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Philosophy
Affiliated Faculty, Department of Linguistics
and Center for Cognitive Science
How Cognition Could Be Computing
ABSTRACT:
Computationalism should be the view that cognition is computable; therefore, computationalism can be true even if (human) cognition is not the result of computations in the brain. Semiotic systems should be understood as systems that interpret signs; therefore, both humans and computers are semiotic systems. Minds can be considered as virtual machines implemented in certain semiotic systems, primarily the brain, but also AI computers. I take issue with James H. Fetzer's arguments to the contrary.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Rapaport, William J. (2011),
"Semiotic Systems, Computers, and the Mind:
How Cognition Could Be Computing"
(ms.)
[
link]
16 November 2011
UB Department of Linguistics
and Center for Cognitive Science
Personification and Grammatical Gender:
New Ideas and Data from Experimental Research and from German Advertising
ABSTRACT:
Renewed interest in linguistics and cognitive psychology in the effects of language on cognition (neo-Whorfian theory) has led to a flurry of research on whether and how speakers of a gender language tend to personify inanimate concepts in accordance with lexicalized grammatical gender. German, e.g., has masc-gender for ‘key’ (der Schlüssel) and fem-gender for ‘bridge’ (die Brücke), while Spanish does the opposite (la llave and el puente). Do German speakers think of keys as more masculine and bridges as more feminine, while Spanish speakers do the opposite? The presentation will (a) briefly review research that both shows and fails to show this connection between language and cognition, (b) present evidence from German poetry and art traditionally used to argue for the connection, (c) present new evidence from German advertising (print and TV) showing that gender-based personification is alive and well in current German cultural discourse, and (d) using this evidence, examine a set of hypotheses limiting the cognitive reach of personification, including:
RECOMMENDED READING:
30 November 2011
Co-sponsored by the UB Department of Philosophy
Co-Director, Center for Cognitive Studies
University Professor
Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy
Tufts University
PLEASE NOTE: This talk will take place in the Student Union Theater
Failures of Imagination
and the "Mystery" of Consciousness
ABSTRACT:
It is difficult to imagine a theory of consciousness, but that does not mean it is impossible, as some philosophical pessimists like to insist. With some help from earlier revolutionary thinkers, in particular Darwin and Turing, we can imagine a family of paths to pursue that can explain consciousness—but we have to abandon a few, deeply held intuitions. Those who refuse to entertain the prospect of abandoning those intuitions will just have to sit on their hands and hope I'm wrong, since, by their own accounts, these intuitions declare the game over: We'll never, ever understand consciousness! Time will tell.
RECOMMENDED READING:
Dennett, Daniel (2009), "Darwin's ‘Strange Inversion of Reasoning’", Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Vol. 106, Suppl. 1 (16 June): 10061–10065.
7 December 2011
UB Department of Linguistics and Center for Cognitive Science
and
Department of Linguistics and Information Science,
Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf
and
Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
The Argument from the Poverty of the Stimulus Redux
ABSTRACT:
Berwick et al. (2011) revisit some of the classic poverty of the stimulus [POS] arguments advanced by Chomsky in earlier work (e.g., Chomsky 1975, 1986) and maintain that they remain unrebutted. They argue that there are four interacting factors that are involved in the development of human capacities like language (2011:1209):
RECOMMENDED READING:
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