Mind/Brain/Behavior Graduate Student Conference

Finding Perfection:
Perspectives on Optimality from Mind, Brain, and Behavior
Harvard University - February 16, 2007
Biolabs Lecture Theater, 16 Divinity Avenue, Cambridge, MA
8:30 am to 6pm

Is it possible to find perfection in the natural world? For example, are the mental faculties that underlie our capacities to acquire and use language, solve problems and navigate our way through the world optimal solutions to complex design problems? Or is natural selection a ‘tinkerer’, producing ad hoc and imperfect responses to adaptive pressures? In response to a growing body of literature in support of the first view, the conference will consider what it means to claim that the mind, or some component of it, is ‘perfect’. Is the notion of optimality compatible with what we know about evolution? Can we find examples of it in other organisms? What conditions must a system satisfy in order to be described as ‘optimal’? What place has the idea of optimality occupied in the history and philosophy of science? And what is its role in shaping how scientific research is practiced?

Schedule for the event is listed below:

8:30 am	Coffee and welcome
9:00	Professor Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Arizona, & Visiting Professor, Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard University The Return of the Laws of Form
10:30	Noah Goodman Computational Cognitive Science Group, MIT Ideal Observers in Theory of Mind
11:10	Margaret Moulson DMC Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience, Children's Hospital, Boston Becoming a “Face Expert: The Role of Early Experience in Shaping Underlying Neural Systems
11:50	Dennis Ott Dept. of Linguistics, Harvard University Reverse-engineering the Language Faculty: Origins and Implications of the Minimalist Program
12:30 pm	Lunchtime panel: Language: A Case Study in Optimality?
1:45	Break
2:00	David Britton Cognitive Neuroscience Program, Dept. of Psychology, CUNY The Presence of Mind: Optimality, Uncertainty and Consciousness in Neurons
2:40	Gary Sing Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University Optimization of Structural Complexity in Motor Adaptation Expressed by a Simple Multi-Rate Learning Model
3:20	Lukas Rieppel Dept. of History of Science, Harvard University Is the Optimal Foraging Model an Optimal Model?
4:00	Break
4:15	Professor Gary Marcus Dept. of Psychology, NYU How Perfect the Mind? Two Perspectives on Evolutionary Psychology

Mind/Brain/Behavior Graduate Student Conference

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