The Marcus Autism Center, in conjunction with the Emory University School of Medicine and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta, is offering three fellowships. Students who will receive a bachelor’s degree by June 2018 will be eligible for the positions. The fellowships will commence in July 2018, and they are 2 years in duration.

 

Students can find further details at: www.cohenfellowship.org and www.simonsfellowship.org.

 

The Cohen Fellowship in Developmental Social Neuroscience will involve cutting-edge social neuroscience research in infants, toddlers and adolescents. Fellows will work to further the understanding of autism through eye-tracking research, guiding a project from the point of data collection to publication of results.

The Marcus Fellowship in Speech Science and Engineering will involve researching early vocal development, including speech production and speech perception, as part of a program to map out both typical and atypical development of spoken communication in early childhood.

The Simons Fellowship in Computational Neuroscience will involve integrating computational strategies with clinical research goals. Fellows will develop methods for the analysis of visual scanning and eye-tracking data, computational models of visual salience, and data visualization techniques, all with the aim of advancing the understanding of autism and efforts at early diagnosis.

Dr. Stephanie Durrleman, University of Geneva, Switzerland

Date: November 6, 2017
Location/Time of talk: BOUS 160, 5pm
Title of talk: Thinking about thoughts: The role of language

Dr. Durrleman is a linguist who currently co-directs a Swiss National Scientific Project entitled ‘The Acquisition of Jamaican Creole: A corpus-based study of early parameter-setting’ (with Professors Ur Shlonsky and Luigi Rizzi). Her monograph: ‘The Syntax of Jamaican Creole: A Cartographic Perspective’ (Benjamins 2008) is the first cartographic analysis of a Creole language. She is also more generally interested in contact languages and was co-editor of the book ‘Structure and Variation in Language Contact’ (Benjamins 2006). She has recently turned her attention to language pathology and more specifically to syntactic development in individuals with autism. This theme, on which she has collaboratively presented and published, is now the focus of her investigations, thanks to a 3-year Swiss National Scientific Research award for her project ‘Syntax in Autism’.

You are invited to participate in the 21st annual Neuroscience at Storrs conference.

Date: Wednesday, November 29th from 2:00-8:30 pm

University of Connecticut, Storrs Campus
Konover Auditorium, Dodd Center Building
2-3:30pm: Graduate School Career Workshop
4-5:30pm: Keynote Lecture, Tony Zador, MD, PhD, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, Title, “Sequencing the Connectome”

Atrium, Bousfield Building
5:30-8:30pm: Reception and Poster session

Conference Website (Search for Neuroscience at Storrs)

The Department of Linguistics may be seeking a native speaker of a lesser-studied language to serve as a language consultant for a course in Linguistic Field Methods in Spring 2018. The position will be paid. The manner and amount of pay may depend on the candidate’s status at the university.

Requirements:

– Native speaker of a less commonly studied language. Native speakers of indigenous and minority languages and dialects are especially encouraged to apply. At this time, we do not need speakers of major international languages including: English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian or other European languages; Chinese, Japanese, Hindi or Urdu.

– Both graduate and undergraduate students are welcome to apply.

– Available to commit to 10 hours per week for the entire Spring 2018 semester.

– No background in Linguistics is required. No training or experience as a language teacher is expected.

– We do expect the applicants to be native speakers of the language, that is to have used it as their primary language during childhood.

 

For further information or to apply, please contact: Prof. Asia Pietraszko: joanna.pietraszko@uconn.edu

Please indicate the language that you speak natively.

———————
Jon Sprouse
Associate Professor
Department of Linguistics

46th Annual Meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy

 

The 2018 meeting of the Society for Exact Philosophy will be held on May 18-20 at University of Connecticut in Storrs, CT.

 

Keynote Speakers:

Elaine Landry
(UC Davis)

Joan Rand Moschovakis
(UCLA)

Craige Roberts
(NYU/Ohio State)

 

The Society for Exact Philosophy invites submissions of papers in all areas of analytic philosophy for its 2018 meeting.

Paper submission deadline: 21 January 2018.

More info located here.

The Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (CT IBACS) is pleased to announce a new call for applications to its seed grant fund.

Full details (and forms for the required letter of intent) can be found on the Institute website.

The seed fund is intended to fund activities in the Brain and Cognitive Sciences (broadly construed) that are likely to lead to applications for external funding, or which otherwise contribute to the mission of the Institute.

Proposed activities should involve collaboration and expertise across laboratories and/or traditional disciplinary boundaries.

Applications for small grants (<$10,000) can be submitted at any time; applications in excess of $10,000 should be submitted by November 1st.

The Institute also invites applications for affiliate memberships.

The Cognitive Science Colloquium series presents:

 

David Rand

Associate Professor of Psychology, Economics, Cognitive Science and Management 

Yale University

 

Title: The cognitive science of fake news

 

November 3^rd  at 4pm, OAK 109

 

Why do people believe patently false news headlines, and what can be done to undermine belief in “fake news”? In this talk I will describe a number of recent findings from my collaboration with Gord Pennycook exploring these issues. For example, what is the role of rational deliberation in belief in fake news? Many have argued that people use rationalization to convince themselves of the truth of stories which fit their political worldview (a form of “motivated reasoning” or “cultural cognition”). On the contrary, in a recent set of studies, we found that people who engaged in more deliberative thinking were better at discerning fake from real news, even for headlines that aligned with their political ideology – suggesting that low-level cognitive processes motivate belief in fake news, and deliberation can override such automatic responses. Illustrating one such automatic process – a fluency heuristic – another set of studies we ran showed that just reading a fake news headline made people subsequently more likely to believe it – even if the headline was flagged as “Disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers,” ran counter to the subject’s political orientation, or was not even explicitly remembered by the subject. In a third set of studies, we have also examined the impact of Disputed warnings more generally, and found an “implied truth” effect – if only some fake stories are tagged with a warning, it increases the perceived accuracy of fake stories without warnings. This is worrying, given that it is much easier to produce fake news than to fact check it (such that only a small subset of all fake news stories will ever be successfully tagged with warnings). Furthermore, this implied truth effect was largest among two sub-populations particularly vulnerable to fake news: Trump supporters and young people. This paper also found that, surprisingly, increasing the salience of headlines’ sources by showing the publisher’s logo in a banner beneath each headline had no impact on perceptions of accuracy. We hope that the results of these studies, as well as others I will discuss, will help guide policy makers in their efforts to reduce belief in blatantly false information.

 

Cognitive Neuroscience Society Annual Meeting 

Boston, March 24-27, 2018

This 4 day event is filled with invited symposia, symposia, posters, awards, a keynote speaker,  and most importantly the opportunity to connect with colleagues.

There is a full schedule of events slated for this year’s meeting such as:

• Invited Symposia
• Symposia
• Poster Sessions
• Keynote Speaker
• George A. Miller Award winner
• The Fred Kavli Distinguished Career Contributions Award winner
• Young Investigators Award winners

Call for abstracts and posters is open now.  More information can be found on the CNS website.

Assistant Professor, Computation/Open Area, Department of Psychology

Academic Title: Assistant Professor

COMPUTATION/OPEN AREA SEARCH, DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF
CALIFORNIA, SAN DIEGO. The Psychology Department
within the Division of Social Sciences at UC, San Diego is committed to
academic excellence and diversity within the faculty, staff and student
body. The Department invites applications for a tenure track Assistant
Professor position from candidates who take a computational approach to
study any of the areas represented in the department (Cognitive Psychology,
Cognitive and Behavioral Neuroscience, Developmental Psychology, and Social
Psychology). Candidates must have a Ph.D., advancement to Ph.D. or ABD, and
have a record of publishable research demonstrating a computational
approach to understanding behavior or links between the brain and behavior.
Candidates with a track record of interdisciplinary and collaborative work
and excellence in teaching will be given preference. We are especially
interested in candidates who can demonstrably contribute to diversity,
inclusion, and equity within an academic setting.

Salary is commensurate with qualifications and based on University of
California pay scales.

Review of applications will begin November 1, 2017 and will continue until
the position is filled.

To Apply:

Candidates should submit a cover letter, curriculum vitae, research
statement, teaching statement, up to 4 selected reprints, names of 3 to 5
referees, and a personal statement that summarizes their past or potential
contributions to diversity .

Please apply electronically via UCSD’s AP On-Line RECRUIT :
Assistant Professor (JPF01542) – Computation/Open Area, Department of Psychology.

 

COGNITIVE OR AFFECTIVE SCIENCE – DEPARTMENT OF PSYCHOLOGY, UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA.

The Department of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania intends to make multiple appointments in the areas of Cognitive Science and Affective Science over the next several years. Our primary focus is at the junior, Assistant Professor level, but in exceptional circumstances a more senior hire may be considered.

We are interested in candidates with research interests in the areas, broadly defined, of cognitive science (e.g., learning and memory, perception, attention, language, or decision making) or affective science (e.g., clinical or health psychology; social, moral, or political psychology; positive psychology; or the psychology of individual differences), and who use any number of approaches, including but not limited to computational, neuroscientific (behavioral, systems, or cognitive), or developmental.

Interested candidates should submit materials online  and include a curriculum vitae, statements of research and teaching interests, and the names and contact information of three references. Candidates will contribute to the teaching mission of the university with introductory courses such as Introduction to Psychology, Introduction to Brain and Behavior, Cognitive Psychology, or Abnormal Psychology, as well as advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in specific areas of interest. References will be contacted by the University with instructions on how to submit a recommendation letter to the website.
Review of applications will begin on September 18, 2017 and continue until the position is filled.

The Department of Psychology is strongly committed to Penn’s Action Plan for Faculty Diversity and Excellence and to creating a more diverse faculty (for more information, see our Diversity Plan). The University of Pennsylvania is an equal opportunity employer. Minorities, women, individuals with disabilities, and protected veterans are encouraged to apply.