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Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments are served. For related CogSci events please go to the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering and the Dept. of Philosophy. If you are interested in receiving email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our email mailing lists. Print this calendar of Spring 2003 events here
Abstracts
Wednesday,
January 15, 2003 Yue
Wang, Ph.D.
"Behavioral and neuro-imaging studies of This research investigated the processing and learning of Mandarin Chinese tone by native and non-native speakers. Two of the fundamental questions addressed are brain plasticity and linguistic experience; that is, to what extent the human brain is plastic in language development, and how experience with a first language influences the acquisition of a second language. The dichotic listening study shows that tone processing is lateralized to the left hemisphere for native Mandarin listeners and this left hemisphere specialization is dependent upon linguistic experience, not generalizing to non-native listeners such as American English and Norwegian. However, non-native listeners' tone processing or perception can be more "native-like" as they gain more experience with Mandarin, as shown by American and Norwegian listeners' significant tone perception and production improvement with perceptual training. Moreover, this behavioral improvement has been instantiated in the brain, as revealed by the fMRI study showing cortical reorganization in the process of learning. Further research extends these findings to the study of developmental change in Mandarin tone processing and learning in children from 6 to 14 years old, investigating brain plasticity in children when exposed to a second language. These results are discussed in terms of the behavioral and neurophysiological aspects underlying language learning. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
January 22, 2003
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall North Campus Ingvar
Johansson, Ph.D. "Reflective Speech Acts" Searle distinguishes between five basic kinds of illocutionary acts: assertives, directives, commissives, expressives, and declarations. Within each of these kinds, now, one can make a further distinction between reflective and non-reflective illocutionarity. Thus, the utterance 'The cat is on the mat' is a non-reflective assertive, where 'I assert that the cat is on the mat' is a reflective assertive. What is the communicative point and linguistic structure of this and similar oppositions? This is the overarching topic of my talk. I will argue, among other things, that the "two-truth-value thesis" for reflective assertives can be generalized into a "two-conditions-of -satisfaction thesis" for all speech acts with a direction of fit. (The ideas to be presented are part of a paper, "Performatives and Antiperformatives," forthcoming in Linguistics and Philosophy. Copies are available from the author: Ingvar.Johansson@ifomis.uni-leipzig.de.) For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 5, 2003 Michael
Worboys, Ph.D. "Cognitively plausible geometries of environmental space" There is a need for computational theories of spatial representation and reasoning to be cognitively plausible, that is properly guided by the way humans think about space. This talk describes work done with human subjects concerning their view of the structure of space at the scale of buildings, neighborhoods, and cities, focusing on fundamental distance and direction relationships. Vagueness is an important component of such relationships. The talk concludes with some discussion of granularity, and the relationship between levels of detail in depictions and descriptions of environmental space. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 12, 2003
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall North Campus Larry
E. Roberts, Ph.D. "Neuroplastic
Adaptations of the We have been studying how neuromagnetic (MEG) and electrical (EEG) fields evoked by tonal stimuli are modified in musicians and by laboratory training at acoustic discrimination in nonmusician subjects. Laboratory studies employ 40-Hz amplitude modulated pure tones of different carrier frequencies which allow us to distinguish activations of the auditory core areas (AI) from those of the belt and parabelt regions (AII). We find that evoked auditory fields localizing to AII (the P2 and right-sided N1c) are enlarged by laboratory training in nonmusicians, and that these same components are enhanced in skilled musicians in accordance with their musical training histories. The findings are compatible with neuroplastic accounts of functional brain attributes associated with musical skill. However, laboratory training does not enhance the amplitude of the 40-Hz auditory steady-state response (localizing to AI) in adult nonmusicians although this response is enlarged in musicians (Schneider et al. NN 2002) and its temporal properties are modulated by acoustic training in nonmusician adults. We are investigating implications for the network behavior that underlies remodeling of the brain by experience. We are also extending the research to children enrolled in Suzuki music programmes and to imaging studies of auditory cortical function in tinnitus. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 19, 2003 Michael
Spivey, Ph.D. "Evidence
for the Spatial and Image-schematic For some time now, cognitive linguists have suggested that human language has as its infrastructure a spatial, perceptual, and embodied format of representation and processing. I will report on a series of experiments that support some of these claims. For example, in an eyetracking experiment, participants listening to spatially-extended stories, and staring at a blank display, tend to make eye movements in the direction of the storys events. Also, a set of offline and online experiments have demonstrated that the major spatial axis of a verbs image schema is generally agreed upon by naove participants, and also exerts an influence on their visual attention and visual memory during real-time language comprehension. These results provide evidence for the embodied perceptual-motor character of linguistic representations. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 26, 2003
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall North Campus Frederique
de Vignemont, Ph.D. "Why
we feel what we see: We have an internal private access to our body that we don't have for the body of others. Yet, for all that, we should not reduce the knowledge of one's own body to proprioception and we have to take into ccount the role of visual information on body representations. In this paper, I intend to addresss the question of the necesary conditions of plurimodale integration in the specific case of body perception. More particularly, I'd like to investigate how we resolve conflicts between visual and proprioceptive information. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 5, 2003
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall North Campus Jeffrey
Runner, Ph.D.
On
the Complementarity of Pronouns and We investigated the role of structural constraints on pronoun and reflexive reference resolution--Binding Theory (BT--e.g., Chomsky 1981)--in sentences containing "picture" noun phrases with possessors (ex. below). We monitored subjects' eye movements while they followed instructions to manipulate one of 3 dolls at a display containing photos of each of the dolls: e.g., "Have Ken touch Joe's picture of him/himself". The photo touched indicates a "judgment" of the sentence interpretation; an analysis of the eye movements reveals how BT is used on-line. I present two findings: (1) pronouns and reflexives do not have complementary referential domains in this construction (contra BT); and (2) BT is not an "initial filter" in on-line reference resolution (contra Nicol & Swinney 1989). I will outline current research investigating the structural and pragmatic factors at play and how they interact on-line. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 19, 2003 Chrysanne
DiMarco, Ph.D. "Computational
Models of Current natural language processing (NLP) systems are, almost without exception, still able to deal only with restricted, simplified,language. While researchers in natural language are beginning to produce systems with real-world utility, NLP systems are still challenged by basic problems associated with analyzing syntax and determining semantic content. A major component of language, the pragmatics of human communication, remains understudied and under-represented in current computational systems. But, in the real world, the pragmatics of natural language---complex nuances of language such as exact choices of words and syntactic structure---carry much of the meaning of a text or utterance. If NLP systems are to be truly effective in everyday use, they must be able to handle much more of these complexities of real-world language. In this talk, I will describe some of our earlier work on building computational systems that incorporate knowledge of lexical and syntactic style, with some additional looks forward to how pragmatics may play a role in the evolution of real-world NLP systems. For a printable version of this file click here.
Wednesday,
March 26, 2003 William
Rapaport, Ph.D.
CONTEXTUAL VOCABULARY ACQUISITION: No doubt you have on occasion read some text containing an unfamiliar word, but you were unable or unwilling to find out from a dictionary or another person what the word meant. Nevertheless, you might, consciously or not, have figured out a meaning for it. Suppose you didn't, or suppose your hypothesized meaning was wrong. If you never see the word again, it may not matter. However, if the text you were reading were from science, mathematics, engineering, or technology, not understanding the unfamiliar term might seriously hinder your subsequent understanding of the text. If you do see the word again, you will have an opportunity to revise your hypothesis about its meaning. The more times you see the word, the better your definition will become. And if your hypothesis development were deliberate, rather than "incidental", your command of the new word would be stronger. This talk discusses a research project that is developing and applying algorithms for computational contextual vocabulary acquisition (CVA): learning the meaning of unknown words from context. We are trying to unify a disparate literature on the topic of CVA from psychology, first- and second-language acquisition, and reading science, in order to help develop these algorithms. We are using the knowledge gained from the computational CVA system to build an educational curriculum for enhancing students' abilities to use CVA strategies in their reading of science texts at the middle-school and college undergraduate levels. The knowledge gained from case studies of students using our CVA techniques will feed back into further development of our computational theory. Research done jointly with Michael W. Kibby, Department of Learning & Instruction, Center for Literacy & Reading Instruction, State University of New York at Buffalo. mwkibby@acsu.buffalo.edu, http://www.gse.buffalo.edu/FAS/Kibby/ For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 2, 2003
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm 280 Park Hall North Campus Jeri
Jaeger , Ph.D. "Current Controversies in Language Acquisition" It is often thought that the main controversy in Language Acquisition is whether or not the ability to learn human language is innate to humans. However, this is incorrect. The ability to learn human language is innate by definition, since it is species specific (only humans learn human language) and is species general (all normally developing humans with normal input learn human language). The real question is WHAT is innate which allows humans to learn language. Answers to this question range from: general learning mechanisms, general cognitive/perceptual abilities, learning strategies specific to language, a Language Acquisition Device which is specific to morphosyntax, among others. In this tutorial, designed for the general Cognitive Science audience, I will lay out some of the assumptions behind these various claims about innateness, and then discuss what sorts of data would be needed in order to support or argue against the various notions of innateness. Finally, I will discuss a few of these data sources in some detail (e.g. Specific Language Impairment), and indicate which of the theories of innateness these facts most clearly support. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 9, 2003
For a printable version of this document, click here. Poster Abstracts Identifying
Perceptually Indistinguishable Objects. We are investigating
a simulated cognitive robot that, when it sees an object perceptually
indistinguishable from one it has seen before, will use reasoning
to decide if they are two different objects or same object perceived
twice. We have conducting experiments with human subjects to determine
what strategies they use to perform this task and how well they
perform it. Results
from a Cognitive Mapping Exercise with Hikers in the Natural Environment Cognitive
maps are valuable for understanding how an individual perceives
the space around them. The majority of studies that employed this
technique have focused on urban environments where roads and buildings
are easily identified as components of the spatial environment.
Kevin Lynch's pioneering work in this area, Image of the City (1960),
determined how people perceive the form of a city through interviews,
surveys, and cognitive mapping. The
Use of Cognitive Feedback by Experts and Novices in a Judgment Task Cognitive feedback (CFB) has been shown to increase performance in multiple cue probability learning (MCPL) tasks in both real life and experimental situations. Our experiment focuses on investigating how experts and novices behave differently in applying CFB, which is presented in forms of relative importance weights of each of the cues and the display of function forms (Weaver and Steward, 2000). We believe this study will provide some interesting insight into how much domain knowledge is necessary to understand and apply CFB. We would also like to determine how well novices and experts are able to process and use different types of feedback (i.e. CFB and Outcome Feedback) and hence determine which type is more useful for novices or for those with prior knowledge of the task. A total of 20 participants, 10 experts and 10 novices, were given a series of baseball statistics and asked to predict how many wins the team would have in a season based on these statistics. Performance measures (e.g. relative weighting accuracy, Lens Model measures), mental workload and judgment strategy were measured. Domain Knowledge was statistically significant for all weights except one less important cues, "stolen bases." In other words, domain knowledge impacts weighting accuracy greatly. Domain knowledge was also found to have a significant effect on judgment performance (Lens Model measures), such as accuracy and knowledge. Mental workload was significantly affected by CFB, but none of the other dependent variables were. Bilingual
Slips of the Tongue: evidence for Multilingual Speech production
planning. The present study is an account of bilingual slips of the tongue. The study compares the types of errors that occur in bilingual slips with monolingual speech errors. Additionally, this study looks at an area of bilingual speech production which has not been researched in previous scholarship, namely, the setting factor in bilingual slips: given a set of hypotheses about setting, do bilinguals show consistency in their speech error behavior? The results will be explained in terms of multilingual speech production planning and sociolinguistic factors. Data for this study comes from trilingual speakers of Ewe-English-French and Hebrew-Romanian-English, in addition to bilingual speakers of Spanish-English, French-English, and Ewe-French. There was also one group of monolingual speakers of English. Are
all agents equal? The goodness of fit between a REFERENT associated with an agent role and a described event has been shown to influence processing. Whether processing mechanisms are sensitive to differences in agent participant ROLES of particular verbs (e.g., whether or not volition is required of an agent) has not been demonstrated. We examined the processing of rationale clauses following agentless passives whose verbs introduced an implicit agent that was either required or not required to (but could) behave volitionally. Rationale clauses took longer to process following passives whose verbs did not require volition of their implicit agents. These results demonstrate that the category of agent is not homogenous. More generally, they suggest that interpretative mechanisms are sensitive to differences in participant roles of particular verbs below the level of semantic roles like agent and patient. The
Effect of Different Writing Systems on Reading: A comparison between
Korean and Mandarin Chinese Most models of reading have been developed to account for the fluent reading of single words written in alphabetic scripts, with clear print and intelligible content (for example, Coltheart, 1978, Caplan, 1992). While this is an appropriate starting point for such models, a complete model of reading should be able to account for a broader range of writing systems, the reading of text, and the fact that readers are often confronted with illegible written material or very difficult content. The present paper presents the results of an experiment in which subjects read texts written with varying intelligibility, in two different orthographies: Korean, a phonetically-motivated alphabetic writing system, and Chinese, a semantically-motivated logographic script. The three hypotheses being tested were the following: First, print distortion and complex subject matter will slow down the reading processes in comparison with writing that contains clear print and simple subject matter. Second, reading for speed vs. reading for understanding will affect reading time. Third, the Korean script and the Chinese script may cause different patterns of behavior in these tasks. For this, five paragraphs were constructed which differed in the following ways: 1) simple content typed in clear print; 2) simple passage hand-written normally but printed faintly; 3) simple passage written with sloppy handwriting; 4) simple typed passage that contained misspelled words, and 5) a typed passage having complex subject matter in clear print. Twenty speakers of Mandarin Chinese and 20 speakers of Korean participated. The subjects were randomly assigned to two different groups consisting of 10 subjects each for each language: one group was asked to read for speed and the other for content. The reading time of each subject for each passage was measured. In this study, I found the following: (1) Poor input affects reading times. As long as the input is clear, people read the passages aloud without serious problems regardless of reading conditions. This effect occurs with both alphabetic and logographic writing systems. (2) The purpose of reading makes people employ different reading strategies. When reading for content, readers of both languages took more time than when reading for speed. However, the time difference did not result from the fact that they used two different reading processes, but was due to the way readers went through the reading process. (3) Different writing systems affected reading time. Differences between two languages are not in processing per se but in representations, specifically, in organization of the lexicon and relationships between orthography, phonology and semantics within the lexicon. Based on the findings of this experiment, I have developed a new reading model which contains a number of innovative features: 1) A Monitoring component is added to account for self-correction during reading. 2) Top-down processing components have been added to account for the role of context. 3) The processing components in the model are language-independent, and differences between reading in alphabetic vs. logographic writing systems are accounted for by positing differences in the linkage of the orthographic, phonological and semantic lexicon. Changes
in Children's Production of Plural Forms of Russian Nouns at Different
Ages. This experiment
used an elicited production task to see how a child's ability to
produce correct plural forms in Russian changes with age. Previous
investigations of the acquisition of Russian morphology focused
primarily on the development of case system (Zakharova, 1958) and
acquisition of gender (Popova, 1958; Kempe, 2001; Babyonshev, 1993). Eight Russian-speaking children, aged 3 to 8;7 participated in the experiment. Following the methodology introduced by Berko in 1958, the stimuli used were real and novel words, each of which was accompanied by a picture. The purpose of using the novel words was to check whether a child really had acquired the rule of plural or had simply memorized the plural forms. The children?s task was to produce a plural form of the objects presented in the pictures. Overall, the children combined the novel nouns productively with the default rule of plural, which means that they did not merely memorize the plural forms, but figured out the default rule. The stimuli (real and novel) were given to the children in such an order that they could easily follow the model the experimenter provided by pronouncing plural forms (different from a default form) of the real practice words; however, the children did so very rarely. This shows that there continues to be a strong reliance on the default rule. The major finding of the study suggests that even the youngest children, such as three-year olds, have productive knowledge of the default rule of the plural in Russian, generalizable to novel word forms. Also, the data suggest that the acquisition of other rules of the plural which are different from the default one occurs later, probably after the age of eight. The
Diminutive as an Instrument of Semantic Precision Linguistic and philological literature on the subject of the diminutive is copious to say the least, focusing on a variety of issues ranging from its phonological properties to its etymology. One aspect of the diminutive that remains a challenge to analysts is the extensive array of expressions in which it seems to be felicitously used, often with extremely distinct and even seemingly opposite senses. The present study will review data which challenges the model proposed in Jurafsky 1996, and will offer an analysis based on the decomposition of the relevant diminutivized forms. I will argue for a model of semantic precision based on semantic selection by the producer as allowed by a given basic form, and dependent on a shared cultural knowledge base and culture-wide agreement which ensures proper interpretation of the message. For the present study, a corpus of over 120 utterances was collected in Mexico from natural discourse between native speakers. Being present and active in the conversation allowed me to gain greater insight into the interaction between the participants of a given communicative event and the essence of the message conveyed through the use of the diminutive suffix –ito. Each phrase and sentence was first analyzed following Jurafsky 1996 which posits a structured polysemy based on a RADIAL CATEGORY model (Lakoff 1987). Such model presents ‘child’ as the central sense from which 16 other pragmatic and semantic senses develop through semantic change driven by metaphor, inference, generalization, and lambda-abstraction. While roughly half the data could be accounted for by being assigned to one of the 16 senses ascribed to the diminutive in Jurafsky 1996, there seemed to be great difficulty in giving an account for the remainder. Such results prompted the need for an alternative analysis that would allow for a fair representation of the complexity of a communication system where no single factor but rather “a set of simultaneous conditions within the producer” drives the communication (Talmy 2000, p. 337). The core of the hypothesis to be put forth here claims that in a communication system, the diminutive allows participants to select certain features of a given concept whose form is diminutivized, alter the level of attention placed on such features, and even communicate a value judgment through the selection made. The position I will present moves away from considering the diminutive suffix –ito as a semantically loaded form. Rather, it suggests assigning to it the properties of a cognitive mechanism that allows for a speaker to dive into the composition of a concept and rearrange its features in order to fine-tune a message, thereby developing the ability to express more accurately a given conceptual representation. Bibliography Jurafsky, Daniel. 1996. Universal tendencies in the semantics of the diminutive. Language: Journal of the Linguistic Society of America. 72 (3), 533 – 578. Washington, DC. Lakoff, George.
1987. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things. Chicago: The University
of Chicago Talmy, Leonard. 2000. Toward a Cognitive Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.5 Roles
of pictures and native language in lexical processing for elementary
Mandarin learners Second language acquisition has been an interest in the field of bilingualism. The processing of words, the basic unit of a language, is one of the major issues in this area. Many past studies have focused on word and picture processing by fluent bilinguals on tasks such as word naming, word categorization, word translation and picture naming. Most of the research has been conducted about learners or bilinguals of Indo-European languages. Few studies have involved Mandarin Chinese; particularly scarce have been those involving adult learners of Chinese in an elementary stage. Mandarin Chinese has a logographic writing system, significantly different from those of most Indo-European languages, which could be deemed as alphabetic. For a person learning a second language, the huge difference between a logographic system and an alphabetic system may result in distinctive lexical processing, relative to two languages using the same alphabetic system. The present study tested native English-speaking adults in the beginning stage of learning Chinese. Six conditions of a translation recognition task were designed on a computer. The six blocks, each of which has fourteen pairs of items, are L1 (here, English) words to L1 words, L1 words to L2 (here, Chinese) pinyin (an alphabetic system used to represent Chinese sounds), L1 to L2 Chinese characters, pictures to L1 words, pictures to L2 Chinese pinyin, and pictures to L2 Chinese characters. The stimuli, either an English word or a picture, were followed by a fixation (here, a plus sign) and then followed by a second word. The subjects were told to decide as fast and accurately as possible if the second word was a correct translation equivalent of the first stimulus by pressing one of the two designated buttons. The accuracy and reaction time were recorded automatically by the computer. The results showed that, first, the time from L1 to L2 was shorter than that from a picture to L2; second, within the two tested L2 components, the time from L1 to Chinese pinyin was shorter than that from L1 to Chinese characters, the logographic system. This study supports the idea that an initial-stage adult language learner uses L1 as a medium to connect a concept with L2, which is predicted by Kroll and Stewart’s (1994) revised hierarchical model. Moreover, the difference in the writing systems is a determinant for the speed of processing words. Exposure
effects for infrequent syntactic structures alter sentence comprehension The effect of
repeated exposure to known but infrequent syntactic structures as
a source of long term learning in adults is relatively understudied.
In three experiments we show that 1) exposure to infrequent and
unambiguous syntactic structures leads to faster processing of these
structures 2) exposure to the less frequent interpretation of ambiguous
structures leads to greater competition with the favored interpretation
and thus slowed processing and 3) increased exposure to these structures
in filler items speeds the onset of processing changes. The
representation of consonant clusters in the mental lexicon. Previous work has shown that perception of a phoneme in a syllable is influenced by the number of similar sounding words (lexical neighborhood, Newman, Sawusch & Luce, 1997). This previous work determined neighborhoods for target syllables using a one phoneme change rule. For example, bow, bath and mouth are neighbors of ?bowth.? The present work focused on how consonant clusters are represented in the mental lexicon. Nonsense syllables composed of initial consonant clusters followed by a vowel and final consonant were used as stimuli. Two rules were used to compute the neighborhood for each target syllable. One was the one phoneme change rule used in previous studies. The second treated clusters of consonants as single units in a one unit change rule. Target syllables with differential neighborhoods based on the two rules were the endpoints of the test series. Results consistently support the one phoneme change rule. These results are consistent with models of word recognition which treat consonant clusters as a sequence of phonemes. [Work supported by NIDCD grant R01DC00219 to SUNY at Buffalo.] The
Role of Predictability and Eye Movements in Linear 'Representational
Momentum' The idea that motion trajectories are encoded implicitly within cognitive representations of moving objects is referred to as ‘representational momentum’ - RM. A large body of experimental work examining the extent to which people perceive the disappearance of a moving object as being located further along its trajectory than was truly the case, has been interpreted as support for this idea. We investigated a linear motion RM paradigm both with and without fixation control and found reliable mislocalization consistent with RM when the eyes were free to move. When EM was restricted in the identical paradigm, RM compatible mislocalization was present only for the longest movement trajectory examined. While these data are compatible with explanations of localization governed by smooth pursuit eye movements that lead the target, gravity effects – the asymmetric localization of vertically moving objects toward the ground – were present regardless of eye movement condition. Such effects do suggest representational biases within visual system representations influence localization. In further experiments, predictability of movement trajectory was removed and apart from gravity effects, no RM-compatible mislocalization was present even when eye movements were allowed. These data suggest that predictability of stimulus motion is related to RM-compatible mislocalization. Why
Do People Think With Pictures? The increasing amount of time, effort, and money spent on the development of visualization systems speaks for the believed importance of these systems. In line with the work of Carroll and Campbell (1989), that importance points to the systems as expressions of an implicit theory that people think better with visualizations and representations to work with. This paper examines that theory by synthesizing cognitive research in several areas to state what we know so far about the cognitive justifications for the belief that visualizations aid in cognitive tasks. Key research discussed includes that of Zhang and Norman (1995) on external representations including visualization, that of Zacks and Tversky on graphic communication, and that of Hutchins (1995) on navigation. These and other authors have approached the question of the effect of visualization on cognition. The goal of this paper is to approach a general understanding of why visualization is perceived as such a powerful tool, by examining relevant past and current research.
Wednesday,
April 15, 2003 Center for Cognitive Science
Tuesday,
April 15, 2003
2:30
pm - 3:45 pm Distinguished Speaker Series 2003 PRESENTS Philip
Johnson-Laird, Ph.D. "How we Reason" A long-standing tradition postulates that human thinking is rational because it is founded on the 'laws of thought'. This talk argues to the contrary that reasoning is not based on such laws, but on the ability to envisage possibilities. A conclusion is judged to be valid if it holds in all such MENTAL MODELS of the given information, and probable if it holds in most of them. This theory is based on three main principles: each mental model represents a possibility; the structure of models corresponds to the structure of what they represent; and models normally represent only what is true. The talk outlines the evidence corroborating the theory from behavioral and brain-imaging studies. Inferences from one model are easier than inferences from multiple models. Knowledge affects the process of reasoning. And, if falsity matters, reasoners commit systematic fallacies. Humans are not always rational, but they are not intrinsically irrational, either. Johnson-Laird was born in Yorkshire, England. He left school at the age of 15 and spent ten years in a variety of occupations until he went to University College, London to read psychology. He later gained his Ph.D. there under the supervision of Peter Wason, and he joined the faculty in 1966. In 1971, he was a visiting member of the Institute of Advanced Study, Princeton, where he began a collaboration with George A. Miller. Subsequently, he held positions at the University of Sussex (1973-1981) and at the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit (1981-1989) in Cambridge, where he was also a Fellow of Darwin College. He returned to Princeton in 1989 to be a member of the faculty at the University, where he is the Stuart Professor of Psychology. He has published ten books, and over two hundred papers. He is married and has two children. In his spare time, if he had any, he would play modern jazz piano. Sponsored by: Department of Psychology, Samuel P. Capen Chair of Anthropology, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The C.S. Peirce Professorhip in American Philosophy, Department of Philosophy For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 16, 2003 Philip
Johnson-Laird, Ph.D. "Naive
Causality: This talk outlines a theory and computer implementation of causal meanings and reasoning. The meanings depend on possibilities, and there are four weak causal relations: A causes B, A prevents B, A allows B, and A allows not-B, and two stronger relations of cause and prevention. Individuals represent these relations in mental models of what is true in the various possibilities. The theory predicts a number of phenomena, and the talk presents experiments corroborating these predictions. Contrary to many accounts, the meaning of causation is not probabilistic, causes differ in meaning and logic from enabling conditions, and causal reasoning does not depend on schemas or rules. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 23, 2003 Kathryn
Murphy, Ph.D. "Seeing the Light: Optical Imaging of Function in Animal and Human Cortex"
Abstract
For a printable version of this file click here
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