Fiery Cushman & Liane Young
Intuition and Moral Judgment
How do we determine what is right and what is wrong? Many philosophers and social
scientists think that moral judgments are derived from conscious consideration of moral
principles. This perspective predicts that individuals will be able to provide consistent
principles supporting their moral judgments, and that cultural factors influencing the
adoption of moral principles should likewise influence the judgments themselves. We
challenge this view with data from a web-based study in which subjects were often unable to
support moral judgments with consistent principles, and in which factors like exposure to
moral philosophy had small or inconsistent effects on moral judgment. We argue that at
least some aspect of moral judgment is an intuitive process grounded in the unconscious
analysis of actions and events. We also discuss research with cognitively impaired
populations that can illuminate the mechanisms underlying intuitive moral judgment.
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Tom Griffiths
Theory-Based Causal Induction
The ability to infer causal relationships from data is central to the
growth of both scientific and everyday knowledge. Traditional explanations
of human causal induction have tended to emphasize either domain-general
covariation-based learning, or domain-specific knowledge about causal
mechanisms. However, it is clear that both of these factors interact in
most interesting cases of causal induction - the key questions are what
prior knowledge is used, and how it is combined with statistical
inference. I will present a computational framework that addresses these
two questions, formulating the problem of causal induction as a Bayesian
decision among a set of causal models generated by a domain theory. I will
apply this framework to two phenomena of causal induction - inferring
causal relationships from contingency data and learning the structure of
physical systems.
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Andrew Shtulman
Differences in the Conceptualization of Believable and Unbelievable Supernatural
Entities
Across time periods and cultures, human beings tend to depict the supernatural entities in
which they believe (e.g., gods, angels, demons) as persons with special properties (e.g.,
the ability to fly, the ability to evade death). Interestingly, human beings also tend to
depict the supernatural entities in which they do not believe (e.g., fairies, vampires,
Santa Claus) as persons with special properties. If what determines the believability of
an unencountered entity is its conformity to preexisting theoretical commitments, then why
might individuals believe in some supernatural entities but not others? I will present
three studies that explore this question in the context of the cognitive assumption that
anything conceptualized as a person is also conceptualized as an animal, as an organism,
as an object, and as matter. Data from both linguistic and nonlinguistic tasks suggests
that individuals bothered by inconsistencies (e.g., Harvard undergraduates) may retain
belief in entities initially inconsistent with their theoretical commitments by
reconceptualizing those entities, removing them from the material-kinds categories whose
properties they defy (e.g., objects, organisms) and placing them into new,
nonmaterial-kinds categories (e.g., forces, energy).
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Irene Pepperberg
Cognitive and Communicative Abilities of Grey Parrots
For over 25 years, Pepperberg has used a modeling (M/R) technique to train Grey
parrots to use an allospecific code (English speech) referentially; she then uses the code
to test their cognitive abilities. The oldest bird, Alex, labels over 50 exemplars, 7
colors, 5 shapes, quantities to 6, 3 categories (color, shape, material) and uses "no",
"come here", "wanna go X" and "want Y" (X and Y are appropriate location or item labels).
He combines labels to identify, request, comment upon or refuse more than 100 items and
alter his environment. He processes queries to judge category, relative size, quantity,
presence or absence of similarity/difference in attributes, and show label comprehension.
He semantically separates labeling from requesting. He thus exhibits capacities once
presumed limited to humans or nonhuman primates.
Studies on this bird and other Greys show that parrots given training that lacks
some aspect of input present in M/R protocols (reference, functionality, social
interaction) fail to acquire referential English speech. Other data suggest that the
extent of learning also depends on the form of input. Studies on how parrots acquire an
allospecific code may elucidate mechanisms of other forms of exceptional learning:
learning unlikely in the normal course of development but that can occur under certain
conditions.
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Rebecca Saxe
Young Infants' Concept of an Agent: Blurring the Boundaries of Domains
Very young infants expect inanimate objects to be solid and cohesive, to move
along continuous paths, and to be caused to move (only) by contact. Infants
take humans, on the other hand, to be exempt from the requirement of contact,
and instead interpret humans^R behaviour in terms the pursuit of goals. These
early abilities have been characterised as reflecting "core knowledge" of two
fundamentally separate domains of cognition: naove physics and naove
psychology. However, data from a series of behavioural studies with infants
challenge this separation between domains. First, even 5-month-olds know that
human action is constrained by physical laws, such as the principle of
solidity. Second, 7 to 12 month old infants possess causal principles that
relate entities across ontological categories, and allow them to infer an
invisible human being as the cause of motion of (only) an inanimate object.
Thus, even very young, pre-verbal infants make flexible and sophisticated
causal inferences that cross the boundaries of the traditional domains of "core
knowledge."
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Aude Oliva
The Representation of Visual Complexity
Real-world scenes are characterized by their variability in objects,
textures, colors, and spatial layouts. Yet, we recognize novel scenes
quickly and effortlessly, independently of the variety of information they
contain. How do human observers represent the visual complexity of a
scene?
Intuitively, a visual pattern appears more complex when we perceive more
variety in its parts and in the connections between its parts. In this
talk, I will present a series of behavioral experiments that address more
specifically the following questions: what are the visual regularities
observers may use to spontaneously organize a pattern into a single unit?
Is visual complexity a perceptual property simple enough so that it can be
compressed along a unique perceptual dimension, or is visual complexity
better represented by a multi-dimensional space of perceptual dimensions
(which ones?)? Finally, how is the perceived visual complexity of a scene
modulated by task constraints?
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Elizabeth Kensinger
Neuroimaging Accurate and Distorted Memories: Effects of Emotional Content
Emotion infuses many of life's experiences. Numerous studies have
demonstrated that the likelihood of remembering a particular experience
can be affected by its emotional content, with emotional experiences more
often remembered than neutral ones. I will present behavioral data
examining whether emotion also influences the accruacy of memory. I also
will discuss neuroimaging evidence that engagement of limbic regions
(particularly the amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex) during encoding and
retrieval mediates the effect of emotional content on the frequency of
memory distortion.
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Joan Chiao
Seeing Race, Hearing Race: Neural and Behavioral Investigations into the
Role of Race in Social Perception
Is race an important feature in social perception? The ability to
transform perceptual input conveyed through the face and voice into social
information about a person's identity or emotional state is critical to
everyday social interaction and survival. Humans are endowed
with flexible mechanisms that support these abilities from the
beginning of life. Moreover, convergent evidence from neuroimaging, TMS
and lesion studies suggest that social perception is a process subserved
by a core system of neural structures, including the amygdala, prefrontal
cortex and superior temporal gyrus. In this talk, I will present
behavioral, FMRI and ERP studies that investigate the effect of racial
group membership on the ability to recognize the identity and emotions of
others. I will argue that race affects social perception to the extent
that 1) perceptual exposure to people of various races differs, 2)
race is visually, as opposed to auditorally, cued, and 3) social status
between racial groups differs.
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Yi Ting Huang
What Exactly Do Numbers Mean?
There is an ongoing dispute about the meanings of number words. Neo-Gricean
theories (Horn, 1989; Levinson, 2000) posit that numbers have lower-bounded
semantics and receive exact interpretations via scalar implicature. Others
(Koenig, 1991; Breheny, 2003) argue that numbers have exact semantics and that
apparent lower-bounded interpretations are achieved by contextual restriction
or reference to subsets of the array. To distinguish these accounts we tested
children and adults in a new experimental task in which scalar implicatures are
canceled and contextual restriction is minimized. Both groups consistently gave
exact interpretations for "two" but lower-bounded interpretations of "some".
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Niels Janssen
The Interplay of Word Positional and Word Form Processes During Language Production
During speaking we select words that convey our thoughts and order these
words according to the grammar of our language. The experiments I present in
my talk address the question of how the ordering of words, or positional
processing, occurs during language production. I will discuss two sets of
experiments; the first set deals with the question whether positional
information of words plays a role during their phonological encoding.
Current models of language production all predict positional and
phonological information to be processed independently. I will discuss
linguistic evidence that calls into question this independence assumption
and discuss a recently proposed model in which it is assumed that positional
and phonological processing interact. Two experiments directly test this
assumption by manipulating positional and phonological processing. The
results of these experiments support a model that assumes interactive
processing of positional and phonological information. The second set of
experiments addresses the nature of this positional information. Finally,
the general implications of this work are discussed.
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Alison Harris
How Selective Is the "Face-Selective" M170 Response? Evidence from Developmental Prosopagnosia and Double-Pulse Adaptation
Faces form an extremely important class of visual stimuli, and converging evidence from different methodologies has
suggested that faces undergo specialized visual processing in the brain. Here I present data from two sets of experiments
examining different aspects of "face-selectivity" in the M170, a component measured with magnetoencephalography (MEG) which
shows a larger response to faces than to a wide variety of other stimuli. First, I examine the question of whether the
face-selectivity of the M170 is related to behavioral performance on face recognition by testing developmental
prosopagnosics, individuals with a lifelong impairment in face perception. While three out of five developmental
prosopagnosics tested show a "non-selective" M170 response with equal amplitudes to face and house stimuli, the remaining
two prosopagnosic subjects are indistinguishable from normal controls. Thus, though the face-selectivity of the M170 is
sometimes correlated with behavioral impairments in face processing, developmental prosopagnosics show substantial variation
in M170 selectivity. It is therefore unclear what "face-selectivity" in the M170 actually means. I attempt to address this
issue through adaptation of the M170 response using a "double-pulse" stimulus presentation paradigm (Jeffreys, 1996). In
this paradigm, two stimuli (S1 and S2) are presented successively with an intervening ISI, and the effect of S1 on the
response to S2 is measured. I find face-selective adaptation of the M170 response, with S1 faces producing a greater
reduction in the S2 response than S1 houses. This differential effect of S1 stimulus holds even when face and house S1
stimuli are equated for amplitude. Adaptation may therefore provide a more sensitive measure of M170 selectivity than the
M170 response itself.
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