Long-Format Talks:
Presenter: Dr. Sten Knutsen
Early Prosodic Experience Shapes Adult Prosody Processing
Prosody is acquired early, but does it continue to shape how adults process speech? We tested whether the rhythmic and tonal properties of parents’ native languages affect prosody comprehension in 362 adults who reported being monolingual English speakers. Participants completed prosodic tasks including affect, turn-end, lexical stress, phrase stress, phrase boundary, and contrastive stress, and performance was analyzed using Bayesian ANOVAs. Parental language background had little effect on accuracy but strongly influenced response times, with participants exposed to syllable-timed or tonal languages showing slower processing. These results suggest that early prosodic experience shapes the efficiency of prosodic processing in adulthood.
Presenter: Dr. Andre Oliver
Bias in the Machine? Human Meta-Representations of Faces and Implicit Bias in AI Face Perception
Theory of mind (ToM) is people’s cognitive ability to rapidly and effortlessly mentally represent the minds of others through meta-representations—their mental models of others’ minds. For example, people predictably meta-represent the faces of social ingroup and outgroup members in ways consistent with social identity theory. These meta-representations have important implications for human-to-human interactions, but I ask whether social groups also have different meta-representations of AI models, such as ChatGPT. If so, are social group members’ meta-representations consistent with implicit biases exhibited by AI models, and what are the implications for human-AI interactions? In this talk, I present my work investigating how social identity shapes people’s mental representations and meta-representations of faces, while sharing ongoing research testing social identity threat’s impact on people’s meta-representations of AI models.
Short-Format Talks:
Presenter: Dr. André Eliatamby
Non-Linguistic Influences on Pragmatics
Speakers often say less than they mean, and listeners use context and background assumptions to fill in any interpretative gaps. Often this process has been modelled as metalinguistic reasoning about what cooperative speakers would typically say. Drawing on evidence from language development, my research investigates how the meaning of sub-propositional units like words and phrases influence this process, and how it may be influenced by non-linguistic representational content.
Presenter: Dr. Elif Poyraz
Hidden Competence in Theory of Mind Development: Inhibitory Control and Developmental Variability
My research program investigates how children develop the ability to reason about others’ minds, focusing on the interaction between conceptual understanding and cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. Using behavioral experiments, longitudinal designs, and computational modeling, my work so far reveals that developmental change is highly variable and often masked by traditional group-level analyses. Together, my work offers evidence for a more interactive, mechanistic account of how social cognition emerges over time.
Presenter: Dr. Amritpal Singh
Investigating the Mechanisms of Abstract Thought
My research program investigates how human thought and behavior are shaped by the interaction between the environment and our psychological mechanisms. One branch of this program studies how perceptual, physical, and cultural factors influence abstract thought and relational reasoning. New branches of my work will investigate abstraction and abstractness in the areas of modal cognition and higher-order mathematical reasoning.
Presenter: Dr. Jocelyn Wang
Memory and Attention as Mechanisms for Creative Thinking
In the epistemic life of an ordinary person, unguided forms of thought, such as mind wandering and creative thinking, are both pervasive and important for our epistemic endeavors. We come up with ideas while daydreaming, get “unstuck” from difficult problems at work by taking a walk, and solve home-design problems with brainstorming. My research demystifies these forms of thought that have been overlooked by traditional philosophy, and unpacks the cognitive processes that undergird them.