Talks: What is Cognitive Science?

Memories are subject to a variety of modifications. For example memories can be distorted selectively facilitated or inhibited. These phenomena provide insights into underlying memory processes expanding our traditional views

We humans perform activities of daily living with great flexibility. Although we mostly rely on procedural memories for many daily routines we are also quite capable of improvising and readily

Dorothy Cheney and Robert Seyfarth have recently argued that baboons think in a propositional discrete-valued rule-governed open-ended and hierarchically structured representational medium; they conclude that baboons think in a

This is the story of a researcher setting out to investigate emotional phenomena and ending up exploring a purely cognitive aspect of it. The opioid system notorious for its involvement

We are emotional creatures whose mood-swings are studied with increasing precision and can be affected by an increasing number of drugs. The research and its applications partake of our unprecedented

Natural languages exhibit polysemy. Polysemy is seen as the case where what we perceive to be a single word has two or multiple related senses. When we use the word

Human beings have a remarkable ability to understand the inner life of thoughts and feelings both our own and those of other people. This ability known as "theory of mind

Social media -- online services that encourage content sharing through individual participation -- have encouraged and enabled people to share various types of information in social and public settings. Data

Conditional sentences like 'Bob danced if Leland danced' are a heavily worked resource in planning communication and inquiry and have provided a wealth of puzzles for researchers in linguistics philosophy

How do children manage to identify number words in the input and acquire their meaning? One solution that has been proposed is that children benefit from attending to their

The talk will refer to three papers each representative of a large body of historical and ongoing work in experimental economics. (1) Individual decision making (Birchby et al) where fundamental

Computer scientists and philosophers have proposed Bayes nets as formal representations of causal systems and many psychologists have claimed them as plausible mental representations. One purported advantage of Bayes nets

Knowledge discovery in databases is a field whose goal is to turn data into knowledge. For example by analyzing a database of credit card customers we can determine what

Digital 3D models are ubiquitous. Yet for the creation andmodification of 3D models we rely on highly specialized tools whichunfortunately limits the user base to trained professionals. In thistalk I

In this talk I address the following general issue: how speech perception and phonology interact and how they don't? I first discuss how factors in speech perception affect phonological patterns

The question ``What does it mean to learn language?'' isone of the greatest topics of scientific inquiry. The problem hasattracted many researchers in linguistics cognitive science and computerscience and

As children learn about the world around them they gather a great deal of evidence from their senses -- how things look sound and feel. But children can also interact

When data are encountered in everyday reasoning most often the data interpretation does not require explicit calculations but instead involves either estimation or more holistic judgments. Much past

A number of recent generativist studies on the development of syntax in young children consider input frequency to be an important factor which influences the course of acquisition of certain

What is it like to remember? It depends on what is meant by the term 'remember'. Aristotle divided memory into two distinct varieties: remembering and recollecting. He argued that remembering

It is a fair question why poets should choose to repeat concrete sounds and/or abstract structures when conveying their poetic messages After all it would seem that repetition devices tend

The received view in contemporary philosophy of language is that� sortals are not needed for reference: the reference of a term � especially that of a directly referential term can

The algebraic competence of 72 12-year-old students was examined to identify profiles of understanding reflecting different algebraic knowledge states. Beginning algebraic competence (mapping abilities: word-to-symbol and vice versa classifying and

Uncertainty is a ubiquitous property of both the physical and mental realm. Decision-making research has repeatedly shown that humans are non- normative decision-makers under uncertainty. I show that when the

From John Locke until the present day temporal pairing has been assumed to be the sine qua non for the formation of an association. Association formation is at the heart

Traditional studies in cognitive development use group averages at different ages to infer developmental patterns of change. Microgenetic studies which follow a group of children with repeated testing produce developmental

I consider bare plural generics and argue that they give voice to our cognitive system�s most primitive generalizations. Explicitly quantified statements in contrast invoke more taxing higher-level cognitive processes. I

A measure that frequently correlates with high false memoryvulnerability is the vivacity of self-reported mental imagery. That is subjects who report mental images as "clear and as vivid as normal

When drawing causal inferences from contingency information participants tend to devalue a moderately effective cause when it is learned about in the presence of a highly effective cause. Although some

A theory is presented that attempts to answer two questions: (1) What visual contents can an observer consciously access at one moment? Answer: only one feature value (e.g. green) per

How does the meaning of an utterance determine its effects on thediscourse and its participants? I study this question using tools from programming-language theory. In particular how do utterances interact

I argue that explaining how one can have knowledge of objects� intrinsic properties (their shape size and color) through the specific means of perception requires distinguishing the situation-dependency from the

I present some tensions that arise in Ockham�s accountof mental language related to the notion of thesupposition of mental terms i.e. what mental termsstand for. The issue is that the

My talk aims to introduce cognitive scientists to recent developments in the foundations of music theory. I describe a number of properties that I believe jointly contribute to the perception

A venerable philosophical tradition stretching back at least to Descartes claims that only language users can possess concepts. But this makes conceptual thought out to be an implausibly rarified achievement.

Meck and Church (1983) estimated a 5:1 scale factor relating the mental magnitudes representing number to the mental magnitudes representing duration. We repeated their experiment with human subjects. We obtained

Descartes had a sophisticated theory of the mind and mental representation. Notoriously he claimed that sensations systematically misrepresent extra-mental reality and he expressed his view by calling sensations "materially false

The moral / conventional task has been widely used to study the emergence of moral understanding in children and to explore the deficits in moral understanding in clinical populations. Previous

The relation between our sensory experience and our conceptual capacities has been and continues to be one of the most important and problematic issues in the history of philosophy and

Within the associationist framework the number of learning trials isuniversally considered a primary determinant of conditioned responding.Evidence for this is typically provided by the stereotyped learning curve which depicts

One of the hallmarks of human psychology is our species' ability to reason about the minds of other individuals a capacity commonly referred to as a theory of mind (ToM).

� �Although identifying and interpreting perceived actions is one of the most fundamental human abilities this ability has long been neglected in the cognitive social and neurosciences. Recently however it

Judging another person's emotions based on nonverbal behavior (e.g. faces vocal prosody) is known to rely partly on somatosensory cortices in the right hemisphere. This finding has been interpreted as

The ability to determine how many distinct objects are present in a given scene or event is fundamental to our capacity to function in and learn about the world around

Traditional theories of moral psychology emphasize reasoning and "higher cognition " while more recent work emphasizes the role of emotion.� I'll present behavioral and fMRI data that support a theory

At the heart of any engagement in things scientific is�developing a sense of what comes to count as evidence.� Evidence to support an explanation and/or evidence to put forth a

The experience of time is fundamental to all experience. Without it we could not perceive the length ofa note the movement of a ball the progression of a melody or

November 20 2003 at 12:00p.m. Psychology Room 101 Busch Campus Dr. Felicia Hurewitz Rutgers University Center for Cognitive Science "Automaticity of Number and Quantity Representations" A great deal of psychological

November 13 2003 at 12:00 pm Psychology Room 101 Busch Campus Dr. Karin Stromswold Psychology - Rutgers University Do Language Genes Exist? Some researchers argue that the ability to acquire