Past Graduate Student Seminars        

April 30, 2008
Navigating Interdisciplinary Research after Graduate School (*details below)

MBB faculty and post-docs

April 23, 2008
"The reading brain - Insights into the underlying neural network from single word reading studies"

Matthias Faeth, GSE, Mind, Brain, and Education program

April 9, 2008
"Comparing Music and Language Cognition: The View from Production"

Aaron Berkowitz, FAS, Department of Music

March 19, 2008
"Broad- & narrow-sense phonology in evolutionary perspective"

Bridget Samuels, FAS, Department of Linguistics

March 5, 2008
"Achieving socially optimal behavior despite selfishness"

Ruggiero Cavallo, FAS, Department of Computer Science

February 27, 2008
Navigating Interdisciplinary Research as a Graduate Student (*details below)

MBB graduate students

**Special Seminars: Navigating Interdisciplinary Research (February 27 & April 30, 6pm)

*Navigating Interdisciplinary Research as a Graduate Student (February 27)

Have you thought about doing interdisciplinary research as a graduate student? Have you wondered if this is the right time to do it? Come hear previous MBB grant recipients talk and answer questions about their experiences working in different labs, navigating relationships with multiple advisors, and taking time away from their home department to pursue new techniques. Panel members include Jake Beck (Philosophy), Peter Blake (GSE), Joanna Christodoulou (GSE), and Malathi Thothathiri (Psychology). This session may be especially useful for students interested in applying for MBB grants.

*Navigating Interdisciplinary Research after Graduate School (April 30)

You have your Ph.D. in one field, but you are interested in pursuing interdisciplinary questions; so, how do you do it? Do you pursue a post-doc in another field? How do you get your foot in the door? Do you try to find an "interdisciplinary" post-doc? How is an inter-disciplinary background received on the job market? How do you get funding? Come hear faculty members Joshua Greene (Psychology), Venkatesh Murthy (MCB), and Jenny Thomson (GSE), as well as MBB post-docs Kristin Shutts (Harvard Psychology & Children's Hospital) and Ansgar Endress (Harvard Psychology & Linguistics), talk and answer questions about their different career trajectories and the choices they have made.

December 12th, 2007
"Neural underpinnings of contextual associations"

Elissa Aminoff, FAS, Department of Psychology

November 28th, 2007
"The interpretation and processing of scalar implicatures"

Daniele Panizza, FAS, Department of Linguistics

November 7th, 2007
"Perception without awareness"

Kranti Saran, FAS, Department of Philosophy

October 24th, 2007
"Creation of a binocular neural circuit"

Pavan Ramdya, HMS, Department of Neuroscience

November 30, 2006
"Language Acquisition"

Malathi Thotharthiri, FAS, Department of Psychology

Young-Suk Kin, HGSE, Programs in Language and Literacy & Quantitative Policy Analysis

November 9, 2006
"Reward and Expectation"

Johannes Haushofer, HMS, Program in Neuroscience

Karim Kassam, FAS, Department of Psychology

October 26, 2006
"Chomsky, Politics, and The Cognitive Revolution"

Phil Loring, FAS, History of Science Department

October 12, 2006
"Conscious Vision"

Ramakrishna Chakravarthi, FAS, Vision Science Lab, Department of Psychology

Camilo Libedinsky, HMS, Program in Neuroscience

December 1st, 2005
Faculty Speaker, title TBA

Prof. Gennaro Chierchia, visiting from the University of Milan-Bicocca

November 17th, 2005
"Learning: Perspectives from computer science and biology"

Loizos Michael, GSAS, Department of Computer Science

Andre Valente, GSAS, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology

November 3rd, 2005
"Fairness: Perspectives from economics and psychology"

Daniel Jacob Benjamin, GSAS, Department of Economics

Kristina Olson, GSAS, Department of Psychology

October 20th, 2005
"Human Universals: Perspectives from education and linguistics"

Yarrow Dunham, Graduate School of Education

Patrick Liu, GSAS, Department of Linguistics

Claims for human universals are made in a variety of disciplines and a variety of content areas. What motivates these claims, and do they serve the same roles in different disciplines? Are they subjected to the same standards of evidence? After an introductory discussion that will attempt to get us all situated with respect to those questions, we will go on to discuss the specific claims for universals put forth in two very different domains: social reasoning and language.

Most claims for human universals in the social domain base their argument on the presumed evolutionary need to either form coalitions or to engage in and monitor reciprocal exchanges. We will discuss one purported universal in each of these two categories and evaluate the arguments and evidence used to support them. Linguists generally agree that there is a Universal Grammar which specifies a common underlying structure to all languages. However, they do not agree on the exact character and nature of these universals. We will first briefly discuss some arguments for the need for linguistic universals. Then we will examine one example of a strong claim for a single universal word order for all languages, and see how a universal word order can nevertheless account for the variation inword order which we observe across languages.

Thursday, April 21st, 2005
Parallels between the history of science and cognitive development in the evolution of evolutionary reasoning

Andrew Shtulman, Department of Psychology

The question of why organisms are adapted to particular environments was first formulated by Greek philosophers as early as 600 B.C. but it was not solved until 1859, the year in which Darwin published "The Origin of Species." Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection has since become a standard topic of high school biology, and yet most students leave these classes with a theory of evolution more akin to those proposed by Darwin's contemporaries than that proposed by Darwin himself. Why did the concept of natural selection elude biologists for so long and why does it continue to elude the average student? More generally, why are scientific concepts difficult to discover and difficult to learn? I plan to shed light on these questions by presenting evidence that concepts like "natural selection" cannot be formulated in terms of preexisting concepts and instead require the effortful construction of novel conceptual resources.

Thursday, March 24th, 2005
Knowledge, Subjectivity and the Engine of Inquiry: Robert Hooke on Memory

Ben Hurlbut, History of Science Department

What is the natural object of scientific inquiry, and how can it be known? These twin questions, asked more than three centuries ago, remain at the methodological center of modern scientific practice - and the sciences of mind, brain, and behavior are no exception. For Robert Hooke (1635-1703), who was deeply concerned about the natural limitations to Baconian natural philosophy, one key place to look for answers to such questions was within the knower.

In a lecture Hooke delivered to the Royal Society in 1682, he gave a detailed description of what he saw as the 'organ of memory.' This anatomy of memory, read in the context of Hooke's other reflections on knowing, simultaneously describes the nature of the knowing subject, the nature of the known object, and the conditions that make an unmediated relationship between these two possible. Hooke conceived memory to be one among several pieces of sensory and cognitive apparatus, each of which required both control (by self-discipline) and augmentation (by external instruments) in order to allow the rational soul unmediated access to the empirical world. Still further, Hooke saw this organ as a 'repository' of ideas, which highlights a rhetorical correspondence between his account and contemporary descriptions of museum collections, one of the most important instruments of knowledge acquisition in Hooke's day.

Students of the mind will undoubtedly note uncanny resonances between Hooke's account of memory and those developed by cognitive psychologists in the late 20th century. What this excursus into the past provides is a specific case through which MBB participants can discuss the significance of these points of resonance, as well as the role (and value) of bringing a historian's sensibility to bear on the sciences of mind and brain.

Thursday, March 10th, 2005
Schizophrenia, Autism, and Introspection

David Gray, Department of Philosophy

Work in both cognitive and clinical psychology has made much progress in understanding the mental deficiencies that are present is mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia. Theories which attempt to explain what is wrong focus on similar phenomena: the failure to have a theory of mind, in the case of autism, and failures of metarepresentational capacities, in the case of schizophrenia. Focusing on the case of schizophrenia, I will examine what claims about failure of metarepresentation amount to and what we can learn about how normal people metarepresent their own mental states. I will also examine how these cases can inform and be informed by recent work done on introspection in the philosophy of mind.

Thursday, February 24th, 2005
Mapping Sounds to Gestural Commands

Gabriel Poliquin, Department of Linguistics

The linguistic sub-field of phonology studies the mental representation of language sounds. Typically, modern linguistics has considered that individual sounds of the world's languages can be broken down into smaller units called features, which can be associated with gestural commands. For example, the sound [t] of "tar" can be broken down into three features: [-voice], because it does not involve vibration of the vocal folds, [+alveolar], because it involves contact between the tip of the tongue and the alveola, and [-continuant], because it involves a discontinuity in airflow from the lungs. The present research program vies to answer two questions: firstly, are gestural commands really part of the language faculty, or can we hypothesize that language and motor control are separate but connected through a complex interface? Secondly, if gestural commands are encoded in the language faculty, what kind of information is encoded and how fine-grained is it? This paper presents two types of experimental results. Preliminary answers to the first question are provided by experimental fieldwork on speakers of Canadian French. Subjects are probed to find out if they make use of phonetic information in making linguistic generalizations. Preliminary answers to the second question are provided by stroboscopic MRI images of Canadian French speakers while making specific utterances to see what gestural commands are employed in the pronunciation of certain sounds.

Thursday, February 10th, 2005
Differences in the Ability to Delay Gratification in Humans and Animals and the Implications for the Evolution of Human Intelligence

Joseph Mazor, Political Economy and Government (PEG) PhD Program

While psychological experiments have shown that even the most advanced primates can only delay gratification for a few minutes, humans can delay gratification for decades. In this talk, I will attempt to reconcile this large discrepancy with continuity between animal and human choice behavior. I will argue that while both humans and animals myopically select whichever alternative maximizes value at any particular moment, humans have acquired a unique reinforcer that provides immediate value based on changes in anticipated future value. I will show how this explanation can account for behavioral economists' descriptive theories of human delayed gratification. I will also suggest how this reinforcer could develop using the principles of conditioning and discuss its uniqueness to humans. Finally, I will argue that this reinforcer and the ability to delay gratification could be of central importance for the evolution of human intelligence (especially imagination and cause and effect reasoning) using evidence about early hominine tool-making.

Thursday, September 30th, 2004
Understanding the Origins of Human Social Hierarchy: Insights from Developmental and Neuroscience Approaches

Joan Chiao, Department of Psychology

Social dominance hierarchy is a core principle underlying social relations across a range of species within the animal kingdom from simple organisms, such as ants and bees, to more complex ones, including chickens, wolves and primates. Dominant individuals within the hierarchy often have primary access to precious resources such as food, territory and mates while submissive individuals may expect protection or care from those of higher rank. Given the importance of access to resources on survival, recognizing who is socially dominant within the group is critical to the welfare of the individual as well as to the maintenance of overall group stability and cohesion. In this talk, I will present evidence from studies that investigate what humans recognize as social dominance cues, what brain mechanisms supports this social ability and when social dominance recognition arises during development.

Thursday, October 14th, 2004
Inaction, Intervention, and Exclusion: The Development of the Frog Visual System

Rebecca Vislay, Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology

The accurate development of the vertebrate visual system is crucial for ensuring that the adult system truthfully perceives visual space. Despite several years of study, the developmental mechanisms underlying the precise formation of the neural map in the brain representing visual space have yet to be sufficiently outlined. It has been suggested that the incredible acuity of the visual system is tuned and maintained using visual activity to guide development. Indeed, the refinement of the projections from the retina to the brain has been shown to depend on visual activity. Not just any visual activity will do, however, and the role which visual activity plays b be it instructive or maintenance b has yet to be determined. Using the developing Xenopus laevis retinotectal system as a model, we aim to shed light on the precise role of visual activity in the development of the visual system.

Thursday, October 28th, 2004
Models for Reasoning about Rationality and Beliefs

Kobi Gal, Division of Engineering and Applied Sciences/Computer Science

A striking ability of human intelligence is our capacity to communicate, cooperate and coordinate with other people in an uncertain world. People's beliefs about others' behavior, and their ability to reason about these beliefs, guide their interaction towards these goals. In Artificial Intelligence, computer agents interact within themselves, and with humans, in diverse applications (e.g., e-commerce, dialog systems, multi-robot systems and networking). In order for these agents to succeed, it is important to be able to represent and to reason about agents' beliefs within a computational framework. This talk will review models and data structures that allow for a natural and efficient representation of agents' beliefs in strategic settings. These models can capture agents that behave irrationally, or have conflicting beliefs. This talk will present results that show that agents who use these models are more successful when interacting with humans. Lastly, it will provide a comparison with traditional approaches in economics.

Thursday, November 18th, 2004
Spatial representations and reasoning among the Tseltal Maya

Linda Abarbanell, School of Education

In my research, I explore the relationship between language, environment, culture and mind by looking cross-culturally at spatial representations and reasoning. Specifically, I look at the encoding of spatial relationships by speakers of the Mayan languages Tseltal and Tsotsil, indigenous languages of Chiapas, Mexico. These languages describe space using the uphill/downhill slope of the land, the position of the sun, and other shared points of geocentric reference. This is in contrast to English which primarily depends on the perspective of the viewer. Using non-linguistic spatial reasoning tasks, I aim to answer three questions: 1) What is the extent of cognitive and linguistic flexibility among adult Mayan speakers? 2) When do any language-driven cognitive effects take hold over the course of child development? 3) How do contextual factors such as literacy, schooling, bilingualism and acculturation interact with language to affect the process of concept formation? Exploring the interaction between language and space is a way to examine the interface between brain-based perceptual processes and important elements of our cultural context.

Thursday, December 2nd, 2004
Why are some explanations better than others?

Tania Lombrozo, Department of Psychology

My research focuses on the psychology of explanation. Why are we driven to seek explanations? How do we compare and evaluate competing explanations? While the question of what constitutes a good (scientific) explanation has generated an enormous literature within philosophy of science, little is known about how people actually generate and assess explanations. My work builds on ideas from philosophy, using concepts developed in philosophy of science to formulate and test empirical theories. By understanding the basis of explanatory intuitions, I hope to shed light on our assumptions about the structure of the world, how it is we represent and privilege causal knowledge, and the role of explanation in learning. In this talk, I'll present a recent project on how people evaluate evolutionary explanations, and why adaptationist explanations may be judged especially satisfying.

Spring 2004:

Thursday, February 19th
"A tale of two cases: Emotion in speech and faces in two boys living with half a brain."

Mary Helen Immordino, School of Education

Thursday, March 4th
"An introduction to the problem of consciousness"

Jacob Beck, Department of Philosophy

Thursday, March 18th
"Are men really better at parallel parking? A look at testosterone and sex differences in spatial ability"

Carole Hooven, Department of Biological Anthropology/ Psychology

Thursday, April 8th
"Selfishness and the Behavior of Genes"

Manus Patten, Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology

Thursday, April 29th
"How do we smell?"

Antoniu Fantana, Program in Neuroscience at the Department of Neurobiology

Thursday, May 6th
"Implications of multilevel selection theory for human behavior, cognition, and culture"

Guest faculty speaker David Sloan Wilson

Professor of Biology and Anthropology, SUNY Binghamton