The schedule for CogSci colloquia will be posted as talks become scheduled.
All talks are at 4PM, in Oak 117, unless otherwise noted.
2020/2021
CogSci Colloquium: Dr. Lewis Gordon on 4/2/21
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Dr. Lewis Gordon, Ph.D.
Department Head of Philosophy at UConn
Friday, April 2nd, 4pm, virtually on Zoom
Talk Title: "The Colonization and Decolonization of Disciplines, Especially in the Human Sciences" (Click the talk title to view recording)
Bio: Lewis R. Gordon is Professor and Head of the Department of Philosophy at UCONN-Storrs; Honorary President of the Global Center for Advanced Studies; Visiting Professor at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa; and Honorary Professor in the Unit for the Humanities at Rhodes University, South Africa. He previously taught at Brown University, where he founded the Department of Africana Studies, and Temple University, where was the Laura H. Carnell Professor of Philosophy and founder of the Center for Afro-Jewish Studies and the Institute for the Study of Race and Social Thought. He co-edits with Jane Anna Gordon the journal Philosophy and Global Affairs, the Rowman & Littlefield book series Global Critical Caribbean Thought, and, with Rozena Maart, Epifania Amoo-Adare, and Sayan Dey, the Routledge-India book series Academics, Politics and Society in the Post-Covid World. He is the author of many books, including Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization (Routledge, 2021) and the forthcoming 论哲学、去殖民化与种族 (“On Philosophy, Decolonization, and Race”), trans. Li Beilei (Wuhan, China: Wuhan University Press, fall 2021) and Fear of Black Consciousness (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the USA and Penguin Book in the UK; German translation, Ullstein Verlag in Germany; Portuguese translation, Todavia in Brazil, forthcoming 2022).
Joseph Henrich & Barbara Rogoff on 2/26
WEIRD problems and potential solutions
Since its inception, psychology’s Western-centric bias has been an impediment to a deeper understanding of human cognition. Our speakers argue that it is time for a radical transformation of social scientific research, and our understanding of human nature as a whole.
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to jointly present Joseph Henrich and Barbara Rogoff
Friday, February 26th, from 2pm - 4:30pm, virtually via Zoom
2.00 pm
W.E.I.R.D. Minds (Click the talk title to view recording)
Joseph Henrich, Professor and Chair of Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard
Over the last few decades, a growing body of research has revealed not only substantial global variation along several important psychological dimensions, but also that people from societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD) are particularly unusual, often anchoring the ends of global psychological distributions. To explain these patterns, I’ll first show how the most fundamental of human institutions—those governing marriage and the family—influence our motivations, perceptions, intuitions and emotions. Then, to explain the peculiar trajectory of European societies over the last two millennia, I lay out how one particular branch of Christianity systematically dismantled the intensive kin-based institutions in much of Latin Christendom, thereby altering people’s psychology and opening the door to the proliferation of new institutional forms, including voluntary associations (charter towns, universities and guilds), impersonal markets, individualistic religions and representative governments. In light of these findings, I close by arguing that the anthropological, psychological and economic sciences should transform into a unified evolutionary approach that considers not only how human nature influences our behavior and societies but also how the resulting institutions, technologies and languages subsequently shape our minds.
3.15 pm
What is learning? Cultural perspectives (Click the talk title to view recording)
Barbara Rogoff, UCSC Foundation Distinguished Professor of Psychology at the University of California in Santa Cruz
Many people who have spent decades in Western schools take for granted a particular way of thinking of learning — as either receiving transmitted bits of information or acquiring it from an external world. In this presentation, I will argue for a paradigm shift, to seeing learning as a process of growth, as people transform their ways of participating in ongoing endeavors to become more competent and helpful contributors to the collective good of all, across time. My perspective is inspired and informed by research observations of a prevalent way of learning in many Indigenous-heritage communities of the Americas — Learning by Observing and Pitching In to family and community endeavors (LOPI). I will discuss some implications of these ways of conceiving of learning, based in studies of how Indigenous American communities often organize children’s learning, with associated distinctions in children’s helpfulness, ways of collaborating, and ways of learning.
Jonathan Prather, University of Wyoming
Date: Friday, November 13th
Time: 4pm
Location: Zoom
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Jonathan Prather, Professor in the Department of Zoology and Physiology at the University of Wyoming.
Talk Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Iris Berent, Northeastern University
Date: Friday, September 25th
Time: 4pm
Room: Virtual via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/95285812000?pwd=L2NFbFNuamVxNFlGSXF5T0N1bFc3QT09
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Iris Berent, a Professor in the Department of Psychology at Northeastern University.
Talk Title: How we reason about innateness
Abstract: Few questions in science are as controversial as the origins of knowledge. Whether ideas (propositional attitudes, e.g., “objects are cohesive”) are innate or acquired has been debated for centuries. Here, I ask whether our difficulties with innate ideas could be grounded in human cognition itself.
I first demonstrate that people are systematically biased against the possibility that ideas are innate. They consider epistemic traits (specifically, ideas, as opposed to horizontal faculties, such as attention) as less likely to be innate compared to non-epistemic traits (sensorimotor or emotive)— those of humans, birds and aliens, and they maintain this belief despite explicit evidence suggesting that the traits in question are in fact innate.
I next move to trace this bias to the collision between two principles of core cognition—Dualism and Essentialism. Dualism (Bloom, 2004) renders ideas immaterial; per Essentialism, the innate essence of living things must be material (Newman & Keil, 2008). It thus follows that epistemic traits cannot be innate. A second series of experiments tests these predictions.
These results show for the first time that people are selectively biased in reasoning about the origins of innate ideas. While these findings from adults cannot ascertain the origins of these biases, they do open up the possibility that our resistance to innate ideas could be in our nature.
I conclude by briefly considering how the dissonance between Dualism and Essentialism can further account for a wide range of other phenomena, from why we are seduced by neuroscience to why we fear the takeover of humanity by AI, and what we think happens when we die.
Please join Iris for a virtual happy hour (open to all) @ 6 PM via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/8587400098?pwd=YmszU2h2UmxNZGJpM1ZMMGZ2c1cvQT09
Open meeting w/ all graduate students @1:30 - 2:00 PM via Zoom: https://zoom.us/j/8587400098?pwd=YmszU2h2UmxNZGJpM1ZMMGZ2c1cvQT09
2019/2020
Carol Miller, Penn State University
Friday, March 6th
Time: 4:00pm
Room: McHugh Hall 206
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Carol Miller, Professor of Communication Sciences and Disorders and Linguistics at Penn State University.
Talk Title: Developmental language disorder at the intersection of working memory and sentence processing: Theoretical and clinical implications
Abstract: A substantial body of research shows the presence of verbal working memory deficits in almost all individuals with developmental language disorder (DLD). However, relatively little is known about the mechanisms responsible for these deficits and how they affect, or are affected by, difficulties with language comprehension and production. Over a number of years, my collaborators and I have investigated verbal working memory and its relation to other variables in children and adults with DLD. We have primarily focused on how working memory interacts with sentence processing and repetition. In this talk, I will review our work, share some of our thinking and questions, and describe proposed next steps in this line of research. We hope that by using working memory models from cognitive science to enhance experimental research in language disorders, we will contribute to both theory refinement and to improved assessment and intervention for people with DLD.
If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Miller during the day, and/or coming to dinner Friday night, please contact Dr. Grela: bernard.grela@uconn.edu
Aaron Shield, Miami University of Ohio
Friday, November 1st
Time: 4:00pm
Room: Oak Hall 117
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Aaron Shield, Professor in the Department of Speech Pathology and Audiology at Miami University of Ohio.
Dr. Shield will provide a talk entitled “Insights into cognitive and linguistic processes from research on autism and sign language”
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss how research into the signed languages of the deaf has the power to illuminate big questions about human language. By comparing spoken and signed languages, we gain a better understanding of what language is, how children learn languages, and how to best characterize and treat language disorders. In particular, I will show how research into the acquisition of American Sign Language (ASL) by deaf children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) sheds new light on various questions about acquisition, such as how children imitate linguistic forms, how children use pronouns and other words that refer to self and other, and how language exposure may affect other aspects of cognition.
Contact Inge-Marie Eigsti (inge-marie.eigsti@uconn.edu) to schedule a meeting with Prof. Shield.
Learn more about Aaron Shield.
Marjorie Solomon, UC Davis
Friday, September 20th
Time: 4:00pm
Room: Oak Hall 117
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Marjorie Solomon, Professor and the Oates Family Endowed Chair in Lifespan Development in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences, and the MIND Institute at UC Davis
Friday, September 20th, 4pm, Oak 117
Dr. Solomon will provide a talk entitled "Executive Control in Children, Adolescents, and Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Behavioral and Neural Mechanisms"
Abstract: Many individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) exhibit executive control deficits, meaning that they fail to maintain appropriate task context representations so they can inhibit impulsive responding, behave flexibly, and thereby effectively pursue their goals. Although individuals with typical development are thought to experience significant maturation of executive control processes during adolescence, those with ASD are thought to exhibit executive control impairments that persist into adolescence and young adulthood and are associated with clinically significant difficulties in social and adaptive functioning, and attention deficit, internalizing, and ASD symptoms. Given the challenges inherent in the transition to adulthood, it is critical to better understand the precise nature and development of executive control deficits in those with ASD, and their associations with behavior. This talk will briefly review behavioral and neuroimaging studies of executive control in ASD, and present new neuropsychological and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) results from the first wave of a large longitudinal cohort sequential study of individuals with ASD and typical development ages 12-22 years. We seek to clarify the neural signatures of executive control deficits in those with ASD and to investigate how the development of executive control impacts the transition to adulthood in these individuals.
If you are interested in meeting with Dr. Solomon during the day, and/or coming to dinner Friday night, please contact Dr. Naigles: letitia.naigles@uconn.edu
2018/2019
Mark S. Seidenberg, University of Madison-Wisconsin
Friday, April 26th
4pm
Room: Oak Hall 117
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Mark S. Seidenberg, Vilas Research Professor and Donald O. Hebb Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. Seidenberg will provide a talk entitled “The Science and Politics of Learning to Read”
Abstract: A remarkably high percentage of children and adults acquire only basic reading skills, causing innumerable problems for individuals and society. Low literacy has multiple causes, some of which seem intractable (e.g., poverty). I nonetheless think we could be doing much better than we are. Part of the problem is a disconnection between the cultures of science and education. Scientists know a great deal about how reading works and children learn, little of which has had any impact on teacher education or classroom practices. I’ll look at these cross-cultural differences, how they developed, and what might be done to overcome them.
Learn more about Mark S. Seidenberg.
Richard Wilson, UConn School of Law
Friday, February 22nd
4pm
Room: Oak 117
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Richard Ashby Wilson, Professor of Law and Anthropology at and Gladstein Chair of Human Rights at UConn.
Professor Wilson will provide a talk entitled: "The Psychology of Incitement and Hate Speech: A Dialogue Between Law and Social Science"
We live in an era of nativist populism, characterized by speech that incites violence on social media, and an escalation in hate crimes. Recent social science research has identified a correlation between online incitement and offline hate crimes in the United States and Europe. What kinds of speech are the most likely to instigate acts of violence? The current research identifies revenge propaganda as the most likely type to instigate atrocities. We coded 242 speeches by a Serbian politician for references to revenge, nationalism, stereotyping, dehumanization, justice, victimization, past atrocities, political institutions and direct threats. After reading one speech or a control, participants answered questions about empathy, intentionality, and whether violence is morally justifiable. Only speeches focusing on revenge and past atrocities intensified justifications of violence. Only revenge speech increased overall negative attitudes towards the out-group. On the level of personality, those who are more politically conservative, feel the world is unjust, engage more in violent media and are male are more likely to justify violence. These findings have implications for the elusive goal of preventing atrocities. The regulatory framework established fifty years ago in the United States is showing signs of severe strain, and this research draws upon behavioral research to construct a systematic evidence-based framework for analyzing the risk that inciting speech will result in imminent lawless action.
Learn more about Richard Wilson.
Paul Bloom, Yale University
Friday, November 30th
4pm
Room: Oak 117
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Paul Bloom, Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science at Yale University.
Dr Epstein will provide a talk entitled "Pleasures of Suffering".
People are hedonists, seeking pleasure and avoiding pain. This view is central to much of psychology and it fits many people’s own sense of why they do what they do. But what about our appetites for spicy foods, hot baths, horror movies, sad songs, BDSM, and hate reading? It runs out that people often seek out pain and suffering—in pursuits such as art, ritual, sex, and sports, and in longer-term projects, such as training for a marathon or signing up to go to war. Drawing on research from developmental psychology, anthropology, and behavioral economics, I suggest that these seemingly paradoxical choices show that we are driven by non-hedonistic goals; we revel in difficult practice, we aspire towards moral goodness, and we seek out meaningful lives.
Learn more about Paul Bloom.
Dr. Cristine Legare, University of Texas at Austin
Friday, October 19th
4pm
Room: Oak 109
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Dr. Cristine H. Legare, Associate Professor of Psychology from University of Texas at Austin.
Dr Epstein will provide a talk entitled "The Evolution and Ontogeny of Ritual".
Convergent developments across social scientific disciplines provide evidence that ritual is a psychologically prepared, culturally inherited, behavioral trademark of our species. I will draw upon the anthropological and evolutionary science literatures to provide a psychological account of the social functions of ritual in group behavior. Solving the adaptive problems associated with group living requires psychological mechanisms for identifying group members, ensuring their commitment to the group, facilitating cooperation with their coalition, and maintaining group cohesion. I will review evidence that the threat of social exclusion and loss of status motivates engagement in ritual throughout development and provide an account of the ontogeny of ritual cognition. The intersection of these lines of inquiry promises to provide new avenues for theory and research on the evolution and ontogeny of social group cognition.
Learn more about Dr. Cristine Legare.
2017/2018
Russell Epstein, UPenn
Friday, April 27
4pm
Room: Oak 109
The Cognitive Science Colloquium Series is proud to present Dr. Russell Epstein, Professor of Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr Epstein will provide a talk entitled "Anchoring the cognitive map: Neural mechanisms for landmark-based navigation".
Learn more about Russell Epstein.
Will Gervais, University of Kentucky
Friday, March 23
4pm
Room: Oak 109
Will Gervais, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Kentucky will give a lecture on:
"Moral distrust of atheists, and how it screws up basic theory on the psychology of religion"
The majority of people on earth view religious belief as a necessary component of morality, leading to moral distrust of atheists. To paraphrase Dostoevsky, without belief in gods, isn’t everything permitted? Gervais will present studies exploring the degree to which people intuitively view atheists as capable of committing various heinous and immoral actions. Indeed, across 13 countries on five continents, people—even atheists themselves—view moral depravity as representative of atheists. Extreme moral prejudice against atheists may skew data essential to theorizing about religion, as basic theory requires accurate assessment of the prevalence of both religious belief and disbelief. Yet, existing large-scale polls typically require individuals to verbally disclose their atheism to strangers over the phone. Indirect measurements indicate that atheism is far more prevalent than previously assumed, suggesting that many promising theories of religious cognition may be in need of heavy revision, if not abandonment.
Barbara Landau, Johns Hopkins University
Friday, October 6
4pm
Room: Oak 109
Barbara Landau, Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins will give a lecture on:
Origins and development of spatial language: Some complexities
The acquisition of spatial language has historically provided a fertile test-bed for theories of language-thought relationships. Does spatial language emerge driven by pre-linguistic spatial concepts, or does it emerge strictly as a function of the linguistic input provided in the environment? In this talk, I’ll consider challenges to both of these positions, focusing on the challenge of accounting for the linguistic combinatorics that are inherent in spatial language. Acknowledging the complexities of the mapping between spatial language and underlying concepts forces us to abandon simplistic hypotheses and to think about learning in new and more subtle ways.
David Rand, Yale University
Friday, November 3
4pm
Room: Oak 109
David Rand, Associate Professor of Psychology, Economics, Cognitive Science and Management at Yale University will present a lecture on:
The cognitive science of fake news
Click here for a recording of this 11/3/17 lecture.
Blurb: 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.
Philip Corlett, Yale University
Friday, December 1
4pm
Room: Oak 109
Phil Corlett, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry at Yale University will present a lecture on:
Psychosis as a window on perception and belief
Psychosis has many causes but is generally defined in terms of conscious experiences of the world, and of oneself, that deviate appreciably from consensual reality. It may be useful to break it down into its component symptoms of anomalous perceptions (“hallucinations”) and bizarre and inexplicable beliefs (“delusions”). A major challenge in developing a comprehensive and coherent understanding of psychosis is to characterize the nature of disturbances that may give rise both to a profoundly altered experience and understanding of the world and to an impairment in one’s capacity to sample and use evidence in order to optimize inferences. I will argue that these symptoms both entail devising a world model that accounts for one's reality. I will explore the degree to which developing our understanding of the brain as a predictive inference device can provide a powerful explanatory framework within which to understand the disruptions in conscious experience of the world that characterize psychosis, from fundamental and pervasive perturbations in interoception, exteroception, self perception to wider disruptions in how one infers the contents of other minds. Moreover, by refining our understanding of how these disturbances may occur, we gain valuable insights to how the brain generates our experiences more generally.