Cognitive Science Colloquium

Fall 2008

All meetings take place on Thursdays, 3.30-5.30 pm in Life Sciences 1103.

September 11 — Randy Gallistel (Department of Psychology and Rutgers Center for Cognitive Science, Rutgers University)

Title: Risk assessment in man and mouse.
Abstract: Subjects decided when to switch from one target to another as time elapsed in a trial. Human subjects were asked to “catch” a target that appeared either at Location A after a short duration (i.e. 2 seconds) or at Location B after a longer. Mouse subjects harvested pellets whose release was triggered either from interrupting an infrared beam in either the “short” hopper or the “long” hopper. The trial type (short or long) was not signaled; subjects relied on their sense of the time elapsed since trial onset to decide when to switch. The relative frequency of the two types varied between blocks. Choosing an appropriate target switch time requires accurate assessment of the risk of premature departure from the short target and late arrival at the long target. The risk has two components: intrinsic (due to variability in the subject’s estimates of elapsed time) and extrinsic (the relative frequency). Both human and mouse subjects track the optimal switch point fairly closely. Thus, under these circumstances risk assessment is accurate and decision-making optimal in both man and mouse. The mouse results open up the possibility of a genetic approach to the neural mechanisms of risk assessment.

September 25 — Daniel Fessler (Anthropology, UCLA)

Title: The evolved psychology underlying culture acquisition: some tentative suggestions
Abstract: Our species' ability to thrive in virtually every ecosystem on the face of the planet is principally due to our capacity to acquire, exploit, and further develop information that we obtain from other people. Anthropologists have long pondered the question of the evolution of what has been termed "the capacity for culture." However, until recently, most attempts to address this issue have relied on informationally and evolutionarily implausible generalized learning mechanisms. Evolutionary psychologists have achieved considerable success in identifying domain-specific mental mechanisms. However, with only a few exceptions, they have largely overlooked the problem of culture acquisition. This talk explores the emerging perspective that our species' use of culture depends on the workings of an assortment of special-purpose psychological mechanisms that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially transmitted information.

October 9 — Robert Seyfarth (Psychology, Penn)

Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA

October 23 — Brian Scholl (Psychology, Yale)

Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA

November 6 — Alison Gopnik (Psychology, UC Berkeley)

Title: Figuring out what we think and why: causal inference and theory of mind
Abstract: In the past ten years theory theorists have begun to make the idea of theories and theory formation more precise. This research has applied work in the philosophy of science and computer science on causal graphical models or Bayes nets to cognitive development. Most of this work, however, has concerned physical causality. I will present new work applying these ideas to children's understanding of psychological causation, including analyses of false belief, trait attribution and free will.

November 20 — Sian Beilock (Psychology, University of Chicago)

Title: Expert performance: from action to perception to understanding
Abstract: What makes a highly skilled performer different from his or her novice counterpart? At first glance, one might suggest that the answer is simple. It is the quality of overt behavior that separates exceptional performers from those less skilled. We can all point to many ‘real world’ examples of such performance differences – just try comparing any professional athlete to his or her recreational counterpart. Although actual performance is one component that differentiates skilled individuals from novices, my research program suggests that these overt performance distinctions are only part of the picture. In this talk, I will present a series of studies exploring differences in the attentional substrates and memory structures governing novice and expert motor skill performance as it unfolds in real time. I will also cover work exploring the role of motor experience in the representation and understanding of skill-relevant information in situations where there is no intention to act. Specifically, I will show that activities as diverse as language comprehension, memory judgments, and preferences for objects/events in one’s environment are modulated by one’s motor skill expertise. Together, this work highlights differences in the cognitive and neural operations supporting novice and skilled performance on the playing field and beyond. Implications for learning, training, and performance breakdowns under stress will be discussed.

December 11 — Barbara Landau (Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins)

Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA