January
17 Business Meeting
24 Barry Smith
31 JP Koenig

February
7 Ken Forbus
14 Carl Alphonce
21 J. David Smith
28 Poster Session

March
7 Spring Recess
14 Donald Stuss
21 Amanda Woodward
28 Daeyoel Lee

April
4 D. Mark & B. Smith
10 Terrence Deacon
11 Terrence Deacon
18 Ellen Prince
25 Business Meeting

Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00pm - 4:00pm, at 280 Park Hall, North Campus and are open to the public. Refreshments will be served.
Click here for a list of all Cognitive Science related events. This page is periodically updated.

January

17 Business Meeting with Jaylan Turkkan, Vice Provost for Research

24 Barry Smith, Ph.D, (phismith@buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Philosophy, UB
     "The Windowing of Attention in Pictures"

31 Jean-Pierre Koenig, Ph.D., ( jpkoenig@acsu.buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Linguistics, UB
    "What's "In" a Word"

February

 7 Kenneth Forbus, Ph.D., (forbus@nwu.edu)
    Dept. of Computer Science, Northwestern University
    "Qualitative Physics as a Language for Cognitive Modeling"
    Introduction by Stuart Shapiro, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering,
    UB.

14 Carl Alphonce, Ph.D.,  (alphonce@cse.buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, UB
    "Computational Implementations of Theories"

21  David Smith, Ph.D. ( psysmith@acsu.buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Psychology, UB
     "Journey to the Center of the Category"

28  Student Poster Session
     Poster Session Pictures

March

 7   Spring Recess

14  Donald Stuss, Ph.D., stuss@psych.utoronto.ca
     Rotman Research Institute, Toronto, Canada
    "Attentional Functioning: The Roles of the Frontal Lobes"

21   Amanda Woodward, Ph.D., alw1@ccp.uchicago.edu
     Center for Early Childhood Research , University of Chicago
     "How Infants Make Sense of Intentional Action"

28  Daeyol Lee, Ph.D., dlee@cvs.rochester.edu
     Center for Visual Science, University of Rochester
    "Neural Mechanisms for Learning Sequential Movements"

April

 4  David Mark, Ph.D. (dmark@geog.buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Geography, UB
     and
     Barry Smith, Ph.D. (phismith@buffalo.edu)
     Dept. of Philosophy, UB
    Geographic Objects and Their Categories"

10  Distinguished Speaker Lecture, Screening Room, Center for the Arts,
     3:30 pm - 5:00 pm
     Terrence Deacon, Ph.D.,(twdeacon@aol.com),
     Dept. of Anthropology, Boston University
     "Human Brains: The Difference That Makes The Difference"

11  Terrence Deacon, Ph.D.
     Dept. of Anthropology, Boston University
     "De-symbolization and Language Processing: A Non-Innate, unlearned
     Origin for UG?"

18  Ellen Prince, Ph.D, ellen@central.cis.upenn.edu
      Dept. of Linguistics, University of Pennsylvania
      "On Identifying the Topic and Why We Might Want To Do So"

25  Business Meeting

Wednesday, January 24, 2001
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
280 Park Hall
North Campus

Barry Smith, Ph.D.
Department of Philosophy
University at Buffalo

"The Windowing of Attention in Pictures"

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Jean-Pierre Koenig, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University at Buffalo

"What's "in" a Word?"

Recent work on the lexicon has stressed how much the syntactic context in which a word occurs is determined by its meaning and that words pattern into word classes on the basis of their meaning. This research suggests that if you know the meaning of a word, you can predict to a large measure the kind of sentences it occurs in. Taking this result as a point of departure, the first part of this talk will discuss how we can use the fact that lexical meaning determines syntactic context of occurrence to infer the structure of the semantic information encoded in words. In particular, my own research suggests that the semantic information included in verbs has two parts, a relational component (which covers notions like possesion, causality, having a mental representation...) and a modal component (which covers notions like negation, necessity, and time).

In the second part of this talk, I will investigate an unanswered question of the recent research on the relationship between syntax and semantics, namely how we can determine the semantic information  included in lexical entries. I will hypothesize that two criteria affect the inclusion of participant information in lexical entries: (1) Whether participant information is obligatory and (2) Whether participant information is specific to a restricted set of verbs. I will present the result of several experiments which draw on a comprehensive survey of the English verbal lexicon.

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Kenneth Forbus, Ph.D.
Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University, Evanston, IL

"Qualitative Physics as a Language
for Cognitive Modeling"

Most research in qualitative reasoning has been driven by applications in engineering, education, and other areas. However, I believe that perhaps the most important role for qualitative physics is providing representations and reasoning techniques for cognitive modeling. This talk will examine ideas from qualitative physics in this light, including speculations on how they can be used for modeling developmental results, as a component in natural language semantics, and as a bridge between perceptual and conceptual representations.

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Carl Alphonce, Ph.D.
Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, UB

"Computational Implementations of Theories"

Theories of human cognition and human cognitive performance are typically complex, reflective no doubt of the complexity of the underlying system and processes which they seek to model. It can be difficult at times to grasp the consequences of such a theory by manual inspection. Implementing the theory can prove helpful. I will explore selected issues related to the computational implementation of theories, drawing examples especially from natural language syntax and sentence processing.

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David Smith, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Department of Music
Center for Cognitive Science
University at Buffalo

"Journey to the Center of the Category"

Knowlton and Squire showed that amnesics perform relatively normally when categorizing dot patterns derived from an underlying prototype. But they are impaired in performing an old/new recognition task with similar materials. Knowlton and Squire concluded that categorization performance relies on an implicit memory system--intact in amnesics--that represents category-level information in the form of prototypes. They concluded that recognition performance relies on an explicit memory system--impaired in amnesia--that contains declarative memories about specific exemplars. This dissociation in amnesia between categorization and recognition seems to challenge a unitary exemplar theory that assumes a single exemplar-based processing system. Responding to this challenge, Nosofsky and Zaki (1998) derived new formal models of categorization and recognition that were intended to explain the amnesia data using only exemplar-based processing.

Our theoretical analysis of Knowlton and Squire's data, and of Nosofsky and Zaki's reinterpretation of them, suggests these conclusions. 1) Comparing to-be-categorized items to a category center or prototype produces strong prototype advantages and steep typicality gradients, whereas comparing to-be-categorized items to the training exemplars that surround the prototype produces weak prototype advantages and flat typicality gradients. 2) Participants (including amnesics) show the former pattern, suggesting their use of prototypes. 3) Exemplar models account poorly for these categorization data, but prototype models account well for them. 4) The recognition data suggest that controls use an exemplar-memorization process more powerfully than amnesics. By pairing categorization based in prototypes with recognition based in memorized exemplars, we support the idea of multiple systems or processes underlying categorization and recognition, we extend other recent accounts of cognitive performance that intermix prototypes and exemplars, and we reinforce traditional interpretations of the categorization-recognition dissociation in amnesia.

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Wednesday, February 28, 2001
2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
280 Park Hall
North Campus

• Sayaka Abe, Department of Linguistics
  Perception of Rhythm in a Musical Phrase
   
• Eva M. Bero, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences
  Spectral Feature Processing:  auditory transfer functions for sinusoidal ripple
   
• Bert Capella, Visiting Student, Department of Linguistics
  Participant Roles and the Role of Particles
   
• Hythem Ishmail, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
  The Fleeting Now: Reasoning about the Passage of Time
   
• Francis Johnson, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
  Revising Beliefs in an Implemented KRR System
   
• Kazu Kawachi, Department of Linguistics
  Practice effects in speech production planning models
   
• Nathan Large, Department of Psychology
  The role of short-term memory in language perception
   
• Frank Lehouillier, Department of Linguistics
  Asymmetric logic
   
• Midori Minami, Department of Anthropology
  Self-recognition and address forms among family members
   
• Luis Paris, Department of Linguistics
  Grammatical encoding of the Event and Temporal structure distinction
   
• Chris Phipps, Department of Linguistics
  The semantics of prepositions with English barrier verbs
   
• John Santore, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
  Identifying perceptually indistinguishable objects
   
• Aniket Saoji, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences
  Auditory masking patterns for simple spectral stimuli
   
• Bharat Sukhija, Department of Computer Science & Engineering
  Do Birds Fly?
   
• Liza Zimack, Department of Psychology
  Talker voice and similarity affect of lexical neighborhoods

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Donald Stuss, Ph.D.
Rotman Research Institute
Baycrest Centre for Geriatric Care
Toronto, Canada

"Attentional Functioning:
The Roles of the Frontal Lobes"

The functions of the frontal lobes have been difficult to differentiate. Terms such as supervisory system and executive control have been used. Recently, the fractionation of frontal lobe functions has been demonstrated.  In this presentation, a model of the functions of the frontal lobes in attention will be presented, based on a modified version of the Supervisory Attentional System of Shallice.  Various attentional tasks assessing hypothesized frontal lobe attentional functions were presented to patients with lesions in various regions of the frontal lobes as well as to patients with non-frontal lesions. These tasks include the Stroop, feature integration decision reaction time tasks, and a "select-what, respond-where" paradigm.  The results indicate that the anterior attentional system is a complex interaction of distinct attentional processes, related to different regions of the frontal lobes, and integrated with posterior brain regions.

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Amanda Woodward, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
Center for Early Childhood Research
University of Chicago

How Infants Make Sense of Intentional Action

The ability to make sense of the actions of other people is critical to human functioning, and the origins of this ability have inspired much speculation and debate. Until recently, there has been little empirical evidence available to inform our understandings this ability in infants. My collaborators and I have begun to address this gap by asking whether infants make sense of human behavior in ways that are continuous with later concepts of intentional action. Adults have a strong propensity to construe behavior as goal-directed. Mature reasoners represent action sequences in terms of the actor's probable goals, weighting goal-related information more heavily in memory than aspects of the events that were not relevant to the actor's goals. With this in mind, we began by assessing infants' encoding of a simple goal-directed action. Babies saw a person reach through a distinctive path in order to grasp one of two toys. This event was repeated until infants had habituated to it. Then, the positions of the toys were reversed, and infant saw test events in which either the path of motion or the goal object of the actor's reach had changed. Six- and 9-month-old infants showed a greater novelty response to the latter events than to the former. Infants at both ages who saw an inanimate object reach toward and grasp or touch the toy did not show this pattern. That is, infants selectively encoded the relation between a human actor and the object she grasped, and do not do this for inanimate graspers. Thus, there is one way in which infant reasoning is continuous with mature reasoning. 

Subsequent findings revealed an interesting set of limitations to infants' ability to interpret actions as goal-directed: (1) Infants do not encode all events in which a person touches an object as goal-directed; (2) Infants' encoding of action changes as their knowledge about specific actions changes; and, (3) Infants' encoding of other people's actions is related to their own experience as actors. These findings indicate that infants' initial conceptions of goal-directed action are grounded in their knowledge about specific acts, rather than being the product of innate abstract conceptions of intentional action. In a final study, we explored one route for infants' moving beyond these early, specific notions of goal-directed action. Mature reasoners are not limited to seeing a canonical set of actions as goal-directed. Rather, we can freely interpret action in context, drawing on our knowledge about actors and situations. We found that in one very simple context, 12-month-old infants were similarly able to use the behavioral and physical context of a novel action to interpret it as goal-directed.

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Daeyeol Lee, Ph.D.
Dept. of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Center for Visual Science
University of Rochester

"Neural Mechanisms for Learning
Sequential Movements"

People often achieve their behavioral goals by various movement sequences. In most cases, these movement sequences are learned and through training, their speed and accuracy improve. I will present some of the results from our behavioral studies showing that different dimensions of movement sequences (e.g., temporal vs. spatial) are not learned independently, but rather acquired as an integrated unit. I will then describe the results from our single-cell recording studies in non-human primates. We recorded the activity of neurons in the supplemetary motor area and the primary motor cortex using a multi-electrode recording system, while the animals were performing a serial reaction time task. The results indicate that majority of neurons in both areas display changes in their activity during the course of sequence learning, suggesting that information about movement sequence is distributed in multiple brain areas.

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and

Barry Smith, Ph.D.
Department  of Philosophy, UB

"Geographic Objects and Their Categories"

This colloquium will report the results of a series of experiments designed to establish how non-expert subjects conceptualize geospatial phenomena. Subjects were asked to give examples of geographic categories in response to a series of differently phrased elicitations. The results yield an ontology of geographic categories--a catalogue of the prime geospatial concepts and categories shared in common by human subjects independently of their exposure to scientific geography. When combined with nouns such as feature and object, the adjective geographic elicited almost exclusively elements of the physical environment of geographic scale or size, such as mountain, lake, and river. The phrase things that could be portrayed on a map , on the other hand, produced many geographic scale artifacts (roads, cities, etc.) and fiat objects (states, countries, etc.), as well as some physical feature types. These data reveal considerable mismatch as between the meanings assigned to the terms 'geography' and 'geographic' by scientific geographers and by ordinary subjects, so that scientific geographers are not in fact studying geographic phenomena as such phenomena are conceptualized by naive subjects. The data suggest, rather, a special role in determining the subject-matter of scientific geography for the concept of what can be portrayed on a map. This work has implications for work on usability and interoperability in geographic information science, and it throws light also on subtle and hitherto unexplored ways in which ontological terms such as 'object', 'entity', and 'feature' interact with geographic concepts.

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Ellen Prince, Ph.D.
Department of Linguistics
University of Pennsylvania

On Identifying the Topic and
Why We Might Want To Do So

Topics' are usually defined in structural terms, typically the leftmost NP in a clause (Halliday 1967; Gundel 1974, 1885...;  Reinhart 1981; Foley and Van Valin 1984...). However, topics so defined are clearly of no use in research attempting to correlate  linguistic form and cognitive function, given that the cognitive notion 'topic' is in fact defined by linguistic form. In contrast, Centering Theory, a computationally tractable means of modeling local  attention in discourse provides us with an algorithm for identifying  what I believe we intuitively think of as 'topic', without defining it  on the basis of its form. In this presentation, I shall show how this works and shall cite some (perhaps surprising) research findings on  the relationship between topic thus defined and the syntactic forms  known as Subject-Prodrop, 'Topicalization', and Left-Dislocation.

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