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Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
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2004 Colloquium
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JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH APRIL |
Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments are served. (Calender of Events: Spring 2004) For related CogSci events please go to the Department of Computer Science and Engineering and the Department of Philosophy. If you are interested in receiving email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our email mailing lists. All
Center for Cognitive Science events are sponsored by
Abstracts
Wednesday,
January 14, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Stephen
Goldinger
Ph.D. "Attributions
of Memory: True and
Over
the past several years, the profound effects of cognitive heuristics
have generated renewed interest among researchers. Along with classic
domains (e.g., decision making), heuristic processes apparently
affect behaviors that are often considered more modular or automatic.
One such domain is recognition memory: Although theories rarely
specify processes beyond matching input stimuli to stored traces,
some researchers (most notably Jacoby and Whittlesea) have suggested
that many other factors can affect a person’s decision to answer
“old” or “new.” In this presentation, I will
briefly review our recent studies examining the fluency heuristic
in recognition memory for words and faces. I will then present new
data on two other heuristics, generation and resemblance, in memory
for Asian and Caucasian faces. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
January 21, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Phillips
Stevens Jr., Ph.D. "Cognitive Implications of Diabolical Witchcraft Beliefs" The
term "diabolical witch" is used here to distinguish this
belief from the several other meanings of the loaded words "witch"
and "witchcraft." This is the nearly universal complex
of beliefs in an evil supernatural being that flies through the
night, steals children, and engages in the most despicable acts
imagined by people. Allegations of certain of these behaviors have
been made in all cultures and throughout history, most recently
in the satanism scares of the 1980s and early 1990s. They seem to
represent fears deeply-rooted in human nature, like Jung's "archetypes"
or Rodney Needham's "primordial characters." Phillips
Stevens, Jr., is Associate Professor of Anthropology. He has conducted
fieldwork in West Africa, the Caribbean, and urban areas of North
America. He has authored or edited several books and numerous articles
in cultural anthropology and African studies, particularly in areas
of religion, folklore, and cultural change. In 1993 he received
a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2000
the UB Student Association gave him a Milton Plesur Award. He is
currently working on a major book on the anthropology of magic,
sorcery and witchcraft.
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
February 11, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Matthew
Dryer, Ph.D.
"Why do languages have nouns and verbs" The question to be addressed is why most if not all human languages distinguish two word classes (or parts of speech) that we can call 'nouns' and 'verbs'. An initial hypothesis is that the distinction corresponds to a basic ontological or conceptual distinction between things and events. I argue that the view that nouns denote things is seriously confused. Rather nouns denote what I will call 'kinds'; it is noun phrases, not nouns, that denote things. However, I will also argue against an alternative hypothesis that the noun-verb distinction corresponds to a basic ontological or conceptual distinction between kinds and events. I will propose instead that the noun-verb distinction reflects the different frequencies with which different sorts of words are used in different syntactic functions. In particular, words that are used more frequently as arguments group together into nouns while words that are used more frequently as predicates group together into verbs. The point is made clearer in languages with a weak noun-verb distinction, in which both nouns and verbs can freely be used as either predicates or arguments. The general idea is that the linguistic categories of noun and verb are due to different frequencies of usage and not to any ontological or conceptual categories. The kind of explanation I offer challenges a popular view in linguistics that language is a "window into the human mind". Linguists often make claims about the human mind on the basis of the nature of language, assuming that we can make inferences from the nature of human language to the nature of the mind. But usage-based explanations of the sort proposed here provide an alternative kind of explanation for the nature of language, without making assumptions about the human mind. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
February 18, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Peter
Wiemer-Hastings, Ph.D. "From
Turing to Tutoring: This
talk will center on Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a vector-based
technique for representing and comparing texts. Following a brief
history of LSA and description of the process by which its representations
are built, LSA will be discussed as a model for human language learning
and representation. Despite the fact that it ignores syntax altogether,
LSA has neared or matched human performance on a variety of tasks.
For single-sentence texts, however, LSA does not perform well, presumably
due (at least in part) to its ignorance of syntax. Research by Dennis
et al, Kanejiya et al, and myself has explored augmenting LSA with
various types of structural knowledge. This work parallels psychological
studies on the effects of structure on similarity judgments. The
talk will conclude with descriptions of applications of LSA as an
expectation-based natural language understanding mechanism. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
February 25, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Jürgen
Bohnemeyer ,
Ph.D. "When
going means becoming gone: This
presentation discusses the framing of motion as change of location
in Yukatek Maya and crosslinguistically. Jackendoff (1983, 1990)
advances a number of arguments to the effect that representations
of motion events at Conceptual Structure cannot be reduced to state
change functions - as suggested by Dowty 1979 and Miller & Johnson-Laird
1976, inter alia - but require primitive conceptual functions representing
translational motion and path relations (i.e., relations of motion
to, from, past, into, out of a ground, etc.). Jackendoff builds
his case in particular on the encoding of 'route' paths, defined
wrt. grounds in between source and goal, and the use of path functions
with state descriptions in metaphors of 'fictive motion' (Talmy
1996, 2000). However, evidence from motion event descriptions in
Yukatek suggests that Jackendoff's rationale is not universally
valid. References For a printable version of this file click here Back to Top Wednesday,
March 3, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus James
Magnuson , Ph.D. "Interaction
in language processing: Everyday
language use is rich and textured. Conventional psycholinguistic
laboratory tasks abstract away from natural complexity in order
to isolate information relevant at different levels of linguistic
description. Such simplifications reduce language use to smaller,
tractable problems, and allow fine-grained chronometric processing
measures. I argue that this approach paradoxically overestimates
the complexity and modularity of language processing, as natural
contexts provide layers of constraints that reduce the burden on
bottom-up and within-level processing. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 10, 2004 280 Park Hall, North Campus Chrysanne
Di Marco, Ph.D. "Computational Models of Natural Language Pragmatics" 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 now 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 involving exact choices of words, syntactic arrangement, and discourse structure---carry a good deal 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 three stages of problems that we have
addressed involving aspects of pragmatics in natural language systems:
preserving style in machine translation, generating finely tailored
documents, and classifying the rhetorical purpose of citations in
scientific writing. Through this progression, various views of natural
language pragmatics will be highlighted, together with the research
issues raised in Computational Linguistics and Artificial Intelligence.
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
March 24, 2004 Eric
Dietrich ,
Ph.D. "Discrete
Thoughts: Advocates
of dynamic systems have suggested that higher mental processes are
based on continuous representations. In order to evaluate this claim,
we first define the concept of representation, and rigorously distinguish
between discrete representations and continuous representations.
We also explore two important bases of representational content.
Then, we present seven arguments that discrete representations are
necessary for any system that must discriminate between two or more
states. It follows that higher mental processes require discrete
representations. We also argue that discrete representations are
more influenced by conceptual role than continuous representations.
We end by arguing that the presence of discrete representations
in cognitive systems entails that computationalism (i.e., the view
that the mind is a computational device) is true, and that cognitive
science should embrace representational pluralism. For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
March 31, 2004 Judy
Kroll , Ph.D. Reading
and Speaking Words in Two Languages:
For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
April 7, 2004 Leslie
Ungerleider , Ph.D.
"How the brain pays attention"
Not
all objects in a visual scene can be analyzed simultaneously due
to the limited processing capacity of the visual system. As a consequence,
attention is used to selectively process relevant objects at the
expense of irrelevant ones. Brain imaging studies using fMRI reveal
how attention modulates the processing of relevant objects in human
extrastriate visual cortex. This modulation appears to be generated
via top-down control from a network of areas in parietal and frontal
cortex. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
April 14, 2004
Student Poster Session
Abstracts to be posted For a printable version of this file click here Wednesday,
April 21, 2004 Eve
Clark ,
Ph.D. "Grounding and attention in word acquisition" In communicative exchanges, participants begin by each paying attention to the other and to what is said. And they ground each piece of new information. That is, they add new information to common ground. With adults, this is done by asserting, displaying, presupposing, or exemplifying understanding as the exchange progresses. In this talk, I focus (a) on how participants in adult-child exchanges establish joint attention, and (b) on the evidence young children offer of grounding new information--in particular new words and information about those words. I will draw first on analyses of gesture, gaze, and talk from video-taped sessions of parent-child dyads in which the parent introduces a one- or two-year-old child to a set of unfamiliar objects; and second, on analyses of longitudinal data from the CHILDES archive where I focus on adult offers of new words and children's responses to such offers. For a printable version of this file click here Distinguished Speaker Series 2004 PRESENTS
Thursday,
April 22, 2003
3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Screening
Room, Center for the Arts Eve
Clark , Ph.D. "Conceptual perspective and speaker choices" Adult speakers choose among perspectives when they talk; they use different terms to pick out different perspectives (e.g., the dog, our pet, that animal). The perspectives adult speakers adopt affect how they both categorize and remember events. Yet studies of lexical acquisition in young children have often proposed a single-perspective view that assumes children can at first use only one term for talking about a referent object or event: a cat can only be called "cat", not "animal" or "Siamese" as well. But since children are exposed to multiple perspectives by the adults around them, it seems reasonable that they too should adopt alternative perspectives from an early age--the many-perspectives view. Moreover, adults offer children pragmatic directions about the meanings of new words and hence about new perspectives. Evidence for this many-perspectives account comes from a range of sources: children spontaneously use more than one term for the same object; they construct novel words to mark alternate perspectives; they shift perspective when asked; and they readily learn multiple labels for the same referent. Eve V. Clark, Professor of Linguistics & Symbolic Systems at Stanford University, grew up and was educated in the UK and France. After completing her PhD in Linguistics with John Lyons at Edinburgh, she worked on the Language Universals Project at Stanford with Joseph Greenberg, and two years later, joined the Linguistics Department at Stanford University. She has taught there since, aside from several years 'off' in the UK and the Netherlands. She has been a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford (979-1980) and a Guggenheim Fellow (1983-1984); she is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a member of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Sciences. Her research has focussed on first language acquisition, in particular on the acquisition of meaning, where she has done extensive observational and experimental research; she has also worked the acquisition and use of word-formation, with detailed comparative studies of English and Hebrew in children and adults, and she has explored the pragmatics of word-coinage, applying the principles of conventionality and contrast to language use as well as to the process of acquisition. In her most recent work, she has been looking at the kinds of information adults offer children about unfamiliar words and their meanings, at the amount of negative evidence children may receive in the course of conversation, and at the relative contributions of gesture and gaze vs. language in adult exchanges with one- and two-year-olds. She has published numerous articles and chapters in linguistics and psycholinguistics. She is co-author of Psychology and Language (1977), and author of The Ontogenesis of Meaning (1979), Acquisition of Romance, with special reference to French (1985), The Lexicon in Acquisition (1993), and, most recently, First Language Acquisition (2003). For a printable version of this file click here
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Last updated on April 6, 2004 by H. Jones
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