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Colloquia occur: Selected Mondays at 4:00 pm - 5:00 pm - Room PY 101.
Colloquia titles will be posted as they become available.
Also see: http://www.indiana.edu/~clcl/Q733_WWW/
Organizer: Mike Jones
Office: PY 357
Phone: 856-1490
Email: jonesmn@indiana.edu
Fall 2009 Q733 Colloquia
- 09/07 Mark McDaniel, Washington University in St. Louis - Abstract
- 09/14 Veit Stuphorn, Johns Hopkins University - Abstract
- 10/12 Mark Steyvers, University of California, Irvine - Abstract
- 10/19 Michelene Chi, Arizona State University - Abstract
- 10/26 Michael Mozer, University of Colorado - Abstract
- 11/02 Kim Plunkett, Oxford University - Abstract
Spring 2010 Q733 Colloquia- 01/25 Sian Beilock, University of Chicago - Abstract
- 02/22 Mary Hayhoe, University of Texas at Austin - Abstract
- 03/22 Lynn Nadel, University of Arizona - Abstract
- 03/29 Lawrence Marks, Yale University - Abstract
- 04/05 Asif Ghazanfar, Princeton University - Abstract
- 04/19 Teenie Matlock, University of California, Merced - Abstract
Abstract 9/7: Mark McDaniel, Washington University in St. Louis
Title: Individual Differences in Learning and Transfer: Stable Tendencies for Learning Exemplars versus Abstracting Rules
Abstract: In this talk, I propose a potentially important difference across individuals in the qualitative characteristics of what they learn from conceptual training experiences. I suggest that during training, some learners focus on acquiring the particular exemplars and responses associated with the exemplars, whereas other learners attempt to abstract underlying regularities reflected in the particular exemplars linked to an appropriate response (termed “rule learners”). I further suggest that an individual’s tendency to either focus on exemplars during learning versus focusing on extracting some abstraction of the concept or problem solution might be a relatively stable characteristic of the individual. Supporting this individual-differences distinction, I will report experiments that demonstrate that the learners indexed a priori as rule learners (through function-learning extrapolation profiles) were more likely to exhibit transfer to novel instances in a problem solving domain and in an abstract coherent category task than were exemplar learners. These individual tendencies were not reliably associated with working memory capacity, achievement test scores, or fluid intelligence, nor did these standard individual-difference measures predict performance in analogical problem solving or acquisition of abstract coherent categories.9/14: Veit Stuphorn, Johns Hopkins University
Title: Should I go? Medial frontal cortex and the decision whether or not to act
Abstract: Cognitive control of behavior depends on neural mechanisms for initiating and inhibiting movements. Motor-related regions in medial frontal cortex, in particular supplementary and pre-supplementary motor areas (SMA, pre-SMA), are widely considered to play a central role in movement initiation and inhibition. To test this hypothesis, we recorded from neurons in SMA and pre-SMA of monkeys performing a countermanding task. Temporal analysis of neural activity and behavior in this task allowed us to test whether neuronal activity is sufficient to control movement initiation or inhibition. Surprisingly, almost all movement-related neurons in SMA and pre-SMA failed to exhibit time-locked activity changes predictive of movement execution. These cells were therefore not sufficient to initiate movements. Furthermore, the activity of most these cells was contingent on the expectation of reward and therefore was also not necessary for movement initiation. We found a small number of neurons that were more active during successful response cancelation. However, only a minority of these putative inhibitory cells responded early enough to be able to influence the cancelation of the movement. This set of findings suggests that the movement-related activity in pre-SMA and SMA is neither sufficient nor necessary to control movement initiation. These results are remarkably similar to recent findings in the supplementary eye field (SEF), despite a number of mechanical differences in the two effector systems. This suggests that the functional organization of the frontal motor system follows broadly parallel principles. In general, the activity in the medial frontal cortex might represent the motivation to generate a particular action if it is necessary to obtain a reward. This signal would serve as a link between reward representation and action execution and could guide action selection during deliberate voluntary decision making.10/12: Mark Steyvers, University of California, Irvine
Title: Wisdom of Crowds: Aggregating Retrieved Memories across Individuals
Abstract: TBA10/19: Michelene Chi, Arizona State University
Title: Ways to Optimize Student Learning: A Learner-centered approach
Abstract: A framework will be provided that offers a way to differentiate active, constructive, and interactive in terms of observable overt learner activities and the corresponding underlying processes. This framework generates a testable hypothesis for predicting learning outcomes, understanding discrepant findings, and prescribing ways to design new instructional paradigms, such as learning by observing learning. Results from this new paradigm will be discussed and preliminary analyses suggesting how observers might learn will be presented.10/26: Michael Mozer, University of Colorado
Title: A probabilistic perspective on cognitive control
Abstract: Human behavior is remarkably flexible. An individual who drives the
same route to work each day easily adjusts for a traffic jam or to pick
up groceries. Any theory of human cognition must explain not only routine
behavior, but how behavior is flexibly modulated by the current environment
and goals. In this talk, we discuss this ability, often referred to as
cognitive control. Control requires that individuals remember the current
instructions, plans, and goals---the task set. Traditional theories
of control consider the task set as being represented in a discrete,
symbolic, all-or-none fashion. Instead, we start from the premise of a
graded, inherently uncertain, probabilistic representation. From this
perspective, control can be cast as Bayesian inference. We present a
theory embodying these assumptions, and show that it provides parsimonious
accounts of performance and neuroimaging data in standard control tasks
(Wisconsin card sorting, Stroop, task switching) and in visual search tasks.
Our theory is rational in that it describes cognitive control as optimizing
performance to the the statistical structure of the environment, subject
to limitations on current knowledge or processing hardware.
My collaborators in this research are Jeremy Reynolds, Karthik Venkatesh, and
David Baldwin.11/2: Kim Plunkett, Oxford University
Title: How infants build a semantic system: Lexical-Semantic Priming in Early Lexical Development
Abstract: Several decades of research documents that infants as young as 12-months-old understand the meaning of many dozens of words insofar as they are able identify an appropriate referent for a word when give a choice between alternatives. The ability to identify appropriate referents, given a label, develops rapidly during the second year of life, so that by the time an infant reaches her second birthday she may understand many hundreds of words. Although we know a great deal about the types of words that infants understand and produce during their second year – so-called word-world relationships, surprisingly, we know virtually nothing about their appreciation of the meaning relationships between words themselves. These meaning relations lie at the heart of the human semantic system: Part of knowing what the word ‘dog’ means involves knowing, if only implicitly, how it relates to the meaning of ‘cat’ or ‘bone’. A proper understanding of semantic development involves identification of how and when infants begin to link words together in a network of meanings, thereby going beyond word-world associations to achieve a system of meanings that underpins human communication.
The investigation of the structure of the mental lexicon in adults has relied heavily on priming studies: Words which prime each other do so because they are linked together in the lexicon. We adopt a similar strategy for investigating the structure of the infant lexicon using an adaptation of the inter-modal preferential looking task in which levels of lexical activation are indexed by visual preference for a target over a distracter object under linguistically primed versus unprimed conditions. The results of our studies indicate that robust semantic/associative priming is in place by 21–24 months-old whereas 18-month-olds fail to show clear cut sensitivity to priming. Additional control experiments have revealed that the locus of these priming effects are at the lexical-semantic level, indicating that before infants reach their second birthday they have already started to form semantic/associative links between words in a fashion that begins to resemble the structure of the adult lexicon.1/25: Sian Beilock, University of Chicago
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA2/22: Mary Hayhoe, University of Texas at Austin
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA3/22: Lynn Nadel, University of Arizona
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA3/29: Lawrence Marks, Yale University
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA4/5: Asif Ghazanfar, Princeton University
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA4/19: Teenie Matlock, University of California, Merced
Title: TBA
Abstract: TBA
Previous Q733 Colloquia
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