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Center for Cognitive Science The Puzzle of the Mind |
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| Fall
2003 Colloquia Schedule
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September October November December |
Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments are served. (Calender of Events) For related CogSci events please go to the Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering and the Dept. of Philosophy. If you are interested in receiving email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our email mailing lists.
Abstracts Wednesday,
September 3, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Simon
Liversedge, Ph.D. "Reading
Disappearing Text: I
will report data from three experiments investigating the influence
of making the words of a sentence disappear during reading. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
September 17, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Laurence
Harris, Ph.D. "Multimodal Representation of Space and Time" Perception is a constructive process. We use our various senses to deduce or construct a mental representation of what is out there. In the case of seeing colours, it seems reasonably intuitive that colours must be only inside the head, since light rays differ only along a frequency continuum. But other aspects of the world, including the layout of space, must also be centrally constructed. Our representation or construction of space involves many different sensory and cognitive systems: it is multimodal. Our visual and auditory systems can tell us the direction of features in the world and sometimes their distance, but it is mainly by interacting in the world that we generate our full perception of space. Interacting involves moving around which introduces other information that is measured by other systems. Thus the brain has to combine information from several different sources to produce its best guess about what it out there. Sometimes the stories coming from different senses are not compatible with one another. This happens often in unusual environments such as when below deck on a boat. There the cabin moves back and forth with us and seems visually stable. But the vestibular system picks up the swell of the boat and gives us a different story. Which should we rely on to determine our orientation? The senses also give different information because of the different properties of the sense organs themselves. For example, it takes longer for the retina to convert light energy into nervous activity than it does for the ear. Which sense should we rely on to determine when things happen? I will talk about how the brain tries to resolve these conflicts. I will illustrate this talk with experiments that my research team have done in which we have given the brain the hardest time by giving it bigger conflicts than usual. We have separated auditory and visual timing cues by looking at the perception of distant events when the sound takes appreciably longer to reach the observer than the light, and we have separated visual from other cues to space and movement by using virtual reality systems. These experiments reveal some interesting strategies that our brain adopts while trying to make a multimodal representation of what's out there. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
October 1, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Gregory
Ward, Ph.D. "Who's
the Ham Sandwich? Previous accounts of DEFERRED REFERENCE (e.g. Nunberg 1995) have argued that all (non-ostensive) deferred reference is the result of MEANING TRANSFER, a shift in the sense of a nominal or predicate expression. An analysis of deferred equatives (e.g. I'm the ham sandwich) suggests an alternative account based on the notion of PRAGMATIC MAPPING: a contextually licensed mapping operation between (sets of) discourse entities neither of which undergoes a transfer of meaning. Moreover, the use of a deferred equative requires the presence of a contextually licensed OPEN PROPOSITION whose instantiation encodes the particular mapping between entities, both of which remain accessible to varying degrees within the discourse model. Finally, it is shown how a complete account of deferred reference must provide for transfers of reference as well as meaning. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
October 8, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Phillips
Stevens Jr., Ph.D. "The
Principles of Magic Ethnology allows us to identify 6 components of what we can call a magical woldview or magical thinking. The conclusion that at least some of these are universal allows us to look beneath the level of culture for an explanation, as the doctrine of cultural universals has presumed to be reasonable for several decades. Now neuroscience may have provided confirmation for this presumption. Discoveries at UCLA in 1999 and 2001 suggest that one component of magical thinking, the principle of similarity, is fundamental to human cognition, even rooted in neurobiology. Illustrated with slides. Phillips
Stevens, Jr., is Associate Professor of Anthropology. He has conducted
fieldwork in West Africa, the Caribbean, and urban areas of North
America. He has authored or edited several books and numerous articles
in cultural anthropology and African studies, particularly in areas
of religion, folklore, and cultural change. In 1993 he received
a SUNY Chancellor's Award for Excellence in Teaching, and in 2000
the UB Student Association gave him a Milton Plesur Award. He is
currently working on a major book on the anthropology of magic,
sorcery and witchcraft.
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
October 15, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Mary
Hare,
Ph.D.
"Admitting
that admitting sense Linguistic, developmental, and psycholinguistic research has documented a close relationship between the meaning of a verb and the syntactic structures in which that verb occurs, and has also shown that learners and comprehenders take advantage of this relationship in acquisition and processing. I will address implications of these facts for issues in structural ambiguity resolution. It has been shown that readers are sensitive to the statistical bias of a verb towards particular syntactic structures. I will argue that verb bias effects reflect the comprehender's awareness of meaning-structure correlations, so that structural biases are based not on the verb itself (as is generally assumed in this literature) but on specific verb senses. I will first demonstrate that individual verbs show significant differences in their subcategorization profiles across parsed corpora, but that the cross-corpus bias estimates are much more stable once sense is taken into account. I will then show that consistency between sense-contingent subcategorization biases and experimenters' classifications distinguish recent experiments which found effects of verb bias from those that did not. Finally, I will present results of a self-paced reading experiment showing that comprehenders expect different structural continuations after identical verbs, depending on what sense of the verb was used. These results argue that comprehenders learn and exploit meaning-form correlations at the level of individual verb senses, rather than the verb in the aggregate. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
October 29, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Michael
Weliky , Ph.D.
"Population Coding of Natural Scenes in Primary Visual Cortex" We
investigated the coding of natural scenes in primary visual cortex
of the ferret using a new technique for multi-site recording of
neuronal activity. This method allowed the simultaneous recording
of neural activity from up to 60 separate sites on the cortical
surface, with fidelity equivalent to a layer 2/3 recording, without
penetrating the brain. At individual sites, evoked activity to natural
scenes was only weakly correlated with the local image contrast
structure that fell within the cells' classical receptive field
and orientation/spatial frequency tuning. However, a population
code, derived from activity integrated across cortical sites having
retinotopically overlapping receptive fields, correlated strongly
with the local image contrast structure. Center-surround interactions
did not significantly alter these correlations. Cell responses demonstrated
high lifetime and population
For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
November 5, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Daniel
Jurafsky ,
Ph.D. "Probabilistic language processing by humans (mainly) and machines (briefly) This talk summarizes a number of results from our lab on the role of probabilistic and statistical knowledge in comprehension, learning, and production of language, at many levels (phonological, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic) by humans (mainly) and machines (too). In comprehension, I'll talk about ambiguity at many levels (lexical, syntactic, semantic, and discourse) and how various probabilistic models can be used i) cognitively to account for psycholinguistic results on human ambiguity processing, and ii) engineeringly to build shallow semantic and pragmatic understanders for sentences. In production I'll present our experiments on lexical production which suggest that humans compute the probability of each word they say to help determine the surface form the words should take. In learning I'll talk about how some kinds of linguistic structure can be viewed as a `learning bias' and combined with empirical, distributional learning to attack the problem of learning phonological and morphological structure. This talk describes joint work with all sorts of really smart people. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday,
November 12, 2003 280 Park Hall, North Campus Maureen
Donnelly ,
Ph.D. "A Layered Theory of Places" In his Scholium to the Principia, Newton distinguishes between absolute places and relative places. He points out that in ordinary spatial reasoning, we use relative places, not absolute places, to locate objects and track their movements. A relative place is any location, such as the interior of a ship, whose boundaries are determined by its standing in a fixed spatial relation to some material object. Taken together, the collection of all relative places is a jumble of locations that may move through or around one another. The purpose of this talk is to present a method for infusing order into this mess by partitioning the set of all relative places into separate collections, called "layers", in such a way that all members of a single layer stand in a fixed relation to one another. This approach is presented as a formal theory (in standard first-order predicate calculus) intended to support reasoning about and representation of places. For a printable version of this file click here
Wednesday, December 3, 2003
Eric
Little
PhD.
"Theoretical Foundations of Threat Ontology (ThrO)" The study of metaphysics can be divided into two distinct branches: the first being ontology and the second being epistemology. Ontology is the study of what is, what exists, what can be logically categorized. Ontologists attempt to capture the most basic structures of reality by developing accurate and comprehensive formal systems that transparently model existing places, times, entities, properties, and relations. An ontologist should operate like an empirical scientist, meaning they should attempt to provide an accurate, third person-based, independently observable description of the world, apart from cultural, linguistic, or other types of cognitive biases. Epistemology, conversely, deals with theories of knowledge and the mental operations of agents (i.e., knowers) who are their bearers. Epistemology is unlike ontology, in that it is unable to provide a third person-based, independently observable description of the world. Knowledge is always tied to some agent who possesses it, since it is the product of the neurological functions of that agent's brain, and the latter are part of the objective, ontological furniture of the world. Threats are special kinds of items which possess both ontological (objective, veridical) and epistemological (subjective, perceived) components. This talk will attempt to elucidate some of the relations between the ontological and epistemological components of threats and threat conditions. For a printable version of this file click here
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