Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture: Recent Episodes

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"Performing for Failure: Embodying Grief on Stage Through Ethnodrama"

Yoon Won Chang | PhD Candidate Department of Anthropology, Emory University

This talk is an excerpt from an ethnography that documents the making of a theater performance about grief after suicide in contemporary South Korea. I analyze how the actors and the director interpret and embody the real-life stories collected through interviews with suicide loss survivors. The creative team experiences the inevitable failures in interpreting the grief, yet attempts to embody the already fractured self-narratives of pain and healing provided by the survivors. I ask how grief becomes a collective experience and how the language and the body are negotiated in this process.

"I am a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Emory University. For the past seven years, I have closely accompanied suicide loss survivors in Korea by organizing grief groups and other cultural events. In my Doctoral dissertation, I explore how suicide loss survivors' experience of grief is sculpted, negotiated, and refracted within the stat suicide prevention policies, the psychiatric intervention, self-narratives, and collective practices of healing."

Intro music: Scream Villian - The Fable - Bensound

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Raphaël Julliard | Anthropology of the Creative Process | Laboratoire d’Anthropologie Sociale, Ehess, Paris, France

"The Creative Engine and the Sense of Rightness"

My research operates at the intersection of anthropology, the psychology of creativity, and micro-phenomenology. It is driven by a central question: in the uncertainty of the creative act, how do creators know when it works? While traditional approaches often rely on retrospective reconstruction, my work focuses on the "creative engine": the real-time feedback loop between Action (what the maker does) and Affect (how the emerging form acts back upon the maker). I posit that creativity is not a cognitive planning process, but a navigational skill steered by a pre-reflective affective criterion—a felt sense of fitness we conceptualize as "Rightness"—guiding the artist between the risks. To study this, I have moved from historical analysis to experimental ethnography, developing a novel methodology—The Researcher-As-Obstacle (RAO)—designed to investigate the creative mind in action. My goal is to establish a rigorous anthropology of this navigational competence, specifically addressing how subjects maintain agency and a path toward Rightness within the flow of creation.

Links to referenced texts: Julliard, R. (2025). Action and affect: Ritual dynamics in Jackson Pollock’s creative process. Journal of Material Culture, 30(2), 171-190. → https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/xpbcw_v1 Julliard, R., Roy, D., & Botella, M. (2026).

The Researcher-As-Obstacle: A methodology for the study of creativity while it happens. Qualitative Research, 26(1), 3-22. → https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/shnax_v3

“The Feeling of Life”: Creative Dynamics Captured in Real Time → https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/92fxy_v1

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Chris Krupenye | Psychological & Brain Sciences | Johns Hopkins University

"The Social Minds of Humans and Other Apes"

Humans are defined in no small part by the complexity of our social lives, and the cognitive mechanisms we possess for making sense of our social worlds. These capacities support unique forms of communication, cooperation, and culture. But how did they evolve, and to what extent do they rely on language or other uniquely human representational machinery? To address these questions, I will explore the social lives of our closest relatives, chimpanzees and bonobos, and present a number of controlled experiments probing their cognition. These studies reveal that other apes gather a diversity of knowledge about their social worlds, and share with humans numerous capacities for tracking and predicting the behavior of their groupmates. These rich foundations of human social intelligence therefore can operate in the absence of language, and very likely evolved at least 6-9 million years ago in the ancestors we share with other apes.

00:00 CMBC Introduction by Dietrich Stout
04:11 Speaker Introduction by Dietrich Stout
05:44 Lecture by Chris Krupenye
01:00:11 Q&A session

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Ken Paller | Neuroscience | Northwestern University

"Sleep-based Memory Reactivation and Opportunities for Better Benefits from Sleep"

"Sleep is critical not only for its restorative benefits but also for its contributions to memory function. Memory reactivation occurs covertly during sleep. Corresponding changes in the brain move memory consolidation forward, enhancing the likelihood of later remembering and stoking creativity. Our habits of overnight memory reactivation—and the specific memories we reactivate each night—influence our daytime psychological well-being. What transpires in our brains after we fall asleep may seem beyond volitional control. To the contrary, it can be strategically modified to seek various benefits. We have developed methods to modify sleep-based memory reactivation using sensory stimulation, and studies with these methods have uncovered various facets of this covert processing, including dreaming. We’ve also sought insights through studies of the well-documented methods of contemplative sleep practices from Tibetan-Buddhist traditions going back many hundreds of years. We are now seeking to apply this knowledge through new health-related applications to make sleep better and help people with sleep disorders such as insomnia, sleep apnea, and nightmares."

00:00 CMBC Introduction by Dietrich Stout
04:20 Speaker Introduction by Stephan Hamann
06:35 Lecture by Ken Paller
54:58 Q&A session

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Jared Medina | Department of Psychology, Emory University
My presentation will explore the cognitive mechanisms behind how the mind actively does embodiment. Using evidence from perceptual illusions (such as the mirror box and rubber hand illusion) and individuals with brain damage, I will discuss foundational processes that shape our bodily awareness. This overview is designed to provoke a broader dialogue on how theories and methods related to embodiment can conceptually inform the development of social AI.

Dr. Medina is an Associate in the Department of Psychology at Emory University, having earned his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University. His research explores the cognitive and neural mechanisms of embodiment and sensorimotor plasticity, using evidence from perceptual illusions, brain damaged individuals, and neuroimaging to investigate how the brain represents the body.

Masaki Matsubara | Center for Contemplative Sciences, Keio University + University of Tsukuba, Japan
"Exploring the transition from the cognitive “Mind” to the phenomenological “Soma,” I will examine whether humans and AI can truly “dance” together through empathy as embodied joint action. I raise the fundamental question of whether a resonant “Field” (Ba) can emerge without the shared vulnerability inherent to biological life. Using the framework of Ki, Do, and Ma (Timing, Intensity, and Space), will discuss how these principles can inform experimental designs for social robots to foster our shared humanity."

Dr. Matsubara is an Associate Professor at the University of Tsukuba and leads the Laboratory for Somatic Intelligence and Artistic Expression. His research integrates contemplative education, embodied cognition, and human-AI collaboration. He utilizes first-person approach and arts-based research to explore the emergence of awareness and compassion.

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Davor Vincze | Guest Artist | Hong Kong Baptist University

"Interdisciplinary Performance in Immersive & Interactive Environments"

In this lecture, Vincze explores how contemporary artistic practices move beyond single disciplines to create experiences that are immersive, interactive, and integrative. Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Janet Murray (immersion and the fourth wall), Ronald Rowe (interactive systems), and Julie Thompson Klein (interdisciplinarity), he examines how these concepts operate in practice through three recent projects: Freedom Collective, an immersive and smartphone-interactive music theatre work; manτεία, a multisensory, AI-driven guided exhibition where artworks interact with one another; and On the Other Earth, a large-scale stereoscopic choreographic installation that redefines the boundaries between dance, cinema, sound, and architecture. Together, these case studies show how composers and artists can design environments that balance structure and emergence, agency and framing, inviting audiences not only to observe but to inhabit and co-shape contemporary artworks.

Davor Vincze is a Croatian composer, sound artist, and curator whose work explores the intersections of music, technology, and interdisciplinary performance. His compositions span immersive opera, interactive installation, AI-generated media, and electroacoustic chamber music. He has collaborated with leading ensembles such as Ensemble Modern and JACK Quartet, and his works have been featured at festivals IRCAM and Music Biennale Zagreb, where he currently serves as Artistic Director. A recipient of the 2025 Giga-Hertz Production Award from ZKM Karlsruhe, Vincze is also a postdoctoral researcher at Hong Kong Baptist University, focusing on audience interactivity and the role of machine learning in composition. He studied at Stanford University, IRCAM, and the music universities in Stuttgart and Graz. His artistic language reflects a keen interest in glitch, hybridity, and meta-reality, and collective experience.

00:00 Introduction of series by Dietrich Stout, Director CMBC
01:47 Introduction of Vincze by Laura Emmery, Associate Professor of Music Theory
04:35 Davor Vincze presentation
39:15 Q&A

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Sashank Varma | Interactive Computing / Psychology | Georgia Institute of Technology

"The Travelling Salesperson Problem: How Humans 'Efficiently' Solve a Problem Which is 'Hard' for Computers"

“The Traveling Salesperson Problem (TSP) is an important problem in mathematics and computer science. A TSP instance is a set of points. To solve it is to produce a ‘tour’ that starts at one point and returns to it after visiting all other points exactly once, and to solve it optimally is to produce a tour of minimum length. As far as we know, computers cannot solve this problem optimally. It is therefore surprising that, for small instances, people produce tours that are near-optimal (i.e., within 10% of the minimal length), and they do so in time linear in the number of points. To accomplish this remarkable feat, we propose that they adopt a divide-and-conquer strategy: first visually clustering the points, then solving each cluster as a smaller TSP instance, and finally joining together these solutions to solve the overall problem. We provide evidence for this proposal in three behavioral experiments and one computational experiment. These findings establish the psychological viability of the divide-and-conquer strategy for solving the TSP, and they set the stage for future studies of how people tame the complexity of computationally ‘hard’ problems.”

00:00 Lecture by Sashank Varma
54:22 Q&A session

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Shaun Gallagher | Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Philosophy | University of Memphis

"Compassion: Real and Artificial"

I’ve proposed a pattern theory of compassion. On this view, compassion is a specific pattern of dynamically related factors that include physiological, cognitive, and affective processes, relational/intersubjective processes, and motivational/action tendencies (Gallagher, Raffone, Aglioti 2024). The idea of compassion as a dynamical pattern is reflected in neuroscientific findings, as well as in compassion practice. This view also allows for a clear distinction between compassion, empathy, and sympathy. Following Dennett’s conception of “real pattern,” compassion can be said to have a pragmatic reality. After summarizing this view I’ll address a question (raised by both computer scientists and Buddhist scholars) about the possibility of creating a compassionate AI system. Can there be such a thing as artificial compassion?

00:00 Introduction of Dr. Gallagher by Dietrich Stout, CMBC Director
01:53 Lecture by Shaun Gallagher
59:31 Q&A session

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Deepu Murty | Associate Professor, Chair of the Committee for an Inclusive Community
Psychology | University of Oregon

"Understanding, Remembering, and Communicating Threatening Events"

Threat alters how we represent information. Under threat, individuals tend to prioritize central details at the expense of surrounding contextual information—a shift that reflects and drives changes in medial temporal lobe (MTL) and cortical network dynamics. This talk will explore how threat reshapes the neural architecture supporting event comprehension, which has downstream consequences on how this information is stored in long-term memory. Moreover, we will show how these shifts in brain networks change how threatening experiences are communicated to others. By examining the interplay between emotion, memory, and social dynamics, we highlight mechanisms through which threat can distort shared understanding and social transmission of information. These findings have broad implications for domains ranging from eyewitness testimony to psychotherapy, which both rely on the accurate communication of threatening events.

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David Sloan Wilson | Professor Emeritus, Department of Anthropology / Biological Sciences Binghamton University | State University of New York

"Mind, Brain and Culture from a Generalized Darwinian Perspective"

Generalized Darwinism refers to any process combining the three ingredients of variation, selection, and replication (VSR). It is both old and new: Old, because all the insights associated with Darwinism during its first few decades were in ignorance of the proximate mechanisms of VSR. New, because with the advent of Mendelian genetics, the entire study of evolution became focused on genes, to the exclusion of other VSR processes. A return to generalized Darwinism didn’t commence until the closing decades of the 20th century and is now in full swing, with profound implications for our understanding of mind, brain, and culture.

Link to ProSocial World website: https://www.prosocial.world/

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Apurva Ratan Murty | Assistant Professor, Psychology | Georgia Institute of Technology

Jared Medina | Associate Professor, Psychology | Emory University

"To Predict or To Explain"

What is even the point of our science? Is it to build models that predict what brains and minds will do even if we don’t fully understand how, or is it to explain the inner workings of the mind and brain, even if our models fall short of accurate predictions or practical mental health benefits.

In this debate-styled meeting, Jared Medina will argue for explanation as the soul of science. Without causal, interpretable, mechanistic accounts, we’re just playing with high-tech models and curve-fitting. For him the goal of our science is about generating understanding in human interpretable terms.

On the opposing side, Apurva Ratan Murty will champion prediction as the only reliable test of scientific understanding. If your theory can’t predict new data, it has limited value. Models that generalize, however messy or uninterpretable, are the real engines of discovery and measure of progress.

This brings us to the core of the conflict. Is prediction sufficient for explanation, or even preferable? Can we trust models we do not understand, or does demand for interpretability needlessly limit our predictive power? Should we be architects of models as tools to describe, anticipate, and control brain behavior, or storytellers who illuminate the architecture of the mind?

Join us as we debate these foundational questions and consider what our field should value most and how these seemingly opposing frameworks co-exist.

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Gil Weinberg | Professor, School of Music and Founding Director of the Center for Music Technology | Georgia Institute of Technology

"Embodied Creative Machines"

Human creativity is directly linked to embodied interaction with the physical environment. At the Robotic Musicianship Group at Georgia Tech, we explore how embodiment effects and enhances both human and artificial creativity. The talk will present a wide range of robotic projects developed at Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology over the last 20 years, from robotic musicians that compose, improvise, and interact with humans in a variety of musical genres, through robotic dancers that respond to human movement, to prosthetic robotic arms that enable amputees to play musical instruments.

Gil Weinberg is a professor and the founding director of Georgia Tech Center for Music Technology, where he leads the Robotic Musicianship group. His research focuses on developing artificial creativity and musical expression for robots and augmented humans. Among his projects are a marimba playing robotic musician called Shimon that uses machine learning for Jazz improvisation, and a prosthetic robotic arm for amputees that restores and enhances human drumming abilities.

Weinberg presented his work worldwide in venues such as The Kennedy Center, The World Economic Forum, Ars Electronica, Smithsonian Cooper-Hewitt Museum, SIGGRAPH, TED-Ed, DLD and others. His music was performed with Orchestras such as Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, the National Irish Symphony Orchestra, and the Scottish BBC Symphony while his research has been disseminated through numerous journal articles and patents. Dr. Weinberg received his MS and PhD degrees in Media Arts and Sciences from MIT and his BA from the interdisciplinary program for fostering excellence in Tel Aviv University.

Gil Weinberg :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/

SEE BELOW FOR SOME OF THE VIDEOS PREVIEWED IN PRESENTATION.
THE AGE OF AI :: https://youtu.be/UwsrzCVZAb8?si=9rfi3NSCwIe1n0NR&t=863
SHIMON IN CONCERT :: https://youtu.be/zG8VWPL35qI?si=54IKr0E8ax26x9Jc
BRAINWAVES / “FISH AND CHIPS” :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/brainwaves?pgid=m2acvhzk1-f5d71d01-9eb3-4cae-a336-1dbf7f335ade
EYEDRUM EXHIBITION :: https://www.gilweinberg.com/brainwaves?pgid=m2acvhzk1-c6092737-f02b-4a58-942b-42e685ea9595
NERVE BEATBUGS :: https://youtu.be/B7WlkVGH1fs?si=I2xWeoqUOWVCPBkc
HAILE :: https://youtu.be/OT2Lp00ib1Y?si=jPupqd-Qb9gCYuHE
THREE-ARMED DRUMMING :: https://youtu.be/fKryPingtww?si=U7SrChs-n-5ctTZW
DRUMMING PROSTHETIC CONCERT @ KSU :: https://youtu.be/6xc2_p-q9tU?si=I7tnesxJyhQUpNAn
JASON BARNES EMG PROSTHETIC ARM SHOWCASE :: https://youtu.be/4rakPJHH7KU?si=sUrBc2zlTiCYvhSy
JASON BARNES - GUINESS WORLD RECORDS :: https://youtu.be/cVFcJ3TMrok?si=C104ssuxrU6Hn_SK
WORLD’S FIRST BIONIC DRUMMER :: https://youtu.be/GKW7cg45EwY?si=1jBmN1ABFXiP-lxb
SKYWALKER HAND :: https://youtu.be/8t8p43m1Iuw?si=SKhs2BTMX6qP-GXz
GIL WEINBERG: LUKE SKYWALKER PROSTHESIS CONTROLS FINGERS AND PLAYS PIANO :: https://youtu.be/HjW1kIt5iQg?si=kHcuIHgsLnAWJvMy

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Héctor Álvarez | Theater Studies, Emory University

"Dilating Time: Tempo as Contemplative Tool in Ota Shogo’s Poetics of Deceleration"

This talk explores Ota Shogo's groundbreaking wordless play "The Water Station" as a paradigm of temporal expansion in contemporary theater, examining how extreme deceleration creates unique spaces for audience reflection and embodied awareness. Together we'll investigate how slowed theatrical time functions not merely as stylistic choice but as philosophical intervention—challenging our accelerated cultural rhythms and opening possibilities for deeper environmental and existential awareness.

Héctor Álvarez is an interdisciplinary artist and scholar working in performance, theater, film, and contemporary opera, who has recently joined the faculty at Emory in Theater Studies. This event marks the first in a planned series of dialogues between the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture and the Keio University Centre for Contemplative Studies in Tokyo, Japan, an interdisciplinary group of contemplative scholars, cognitive scientists and artists.

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Shay Welch | Associate Professor of Philosophy | Spelman College

"The Bio-Psycho-Social Affect Loop, HyperSensitivity, and Radical Embodied Cognition"

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Tara Callaghan | Professor of Psychology, St. Francis Xavier University, Nova Scotia, Canada

"Fostering Prosociality in Refugee Children: An Intervention with Rohingya Children"

Prosocial behavior is a distinguishing characteristic of human nature. Although prosocial behaviors emerge early in development, contextual factors play an important role in how these behaviors are manifested over development. A large body of research focuses on the trajectory of prosocial development across diverse cultures and investigating contexts that foster it. Against this backdrop of developmental research endeavoring to understand and enhance the cooperative side of humanity, is the catastrophic impact of profoundly negative forces on social-emotional development for children forced to flee from violent conflict. Close to half a million Rohingya children, whose families were forced to flee genocide in Myanmar, now live in the largest refugee camp in the world. To examine the resilience of human prosociality in the face of extreme adversity, we documented initial levels of prosociality in Rohingya refugee children living in a mega-camp (Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh) and the extent to which those levels were improved following a multifaceted intervention designed to foster prosociality. The research was a partnership between Rohingya community members with lived experience, humanitarian practitioners, and developmental researchers. (Continued - for the full ABSTRACT follow this link: https://bit.ly/cmbclecturecallaghan )

00:00 Intro by Philippe Rochet, Professor of Psychology, Emory University

03:52 Lecture

46:38 Q&A Session

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Alexandra (Sasha) Key | Professor, Marcus Autism Center, Emory University School of Medicine
"Building a functional communication system: Does the baby have a say?"

For a long time, language development has been framed mainly in the context of nature-nurture interactions. However, research in non-typical development suggests that another critical contributor should be considered. In this talk, I will present findings from neurophysiological studies in infants and children to demonstrate the importance of self-initiated active engagement with spoken communication for supporting more optimal developmental outcomes. Our data will demonstrate that choosing to engage with speech, an indication of social motivation, is an integral part of the previously established associations between the neural systems and the environmental factors contributing to individual differences in language development. Expanding the general conceptual approach to language to include nature-nurture-person will allow us to better understand the sources of variability in functional communication abilities across the full spectrum of developmental outcomes.

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Anna Ivanova | Assistant Professor, School of Psychology | Georgia Tech College of Sciences
"Dissociating Language and Thought in Humans and in Machines"

“What is the relationship between language and thought? This question has long intrigued researchers across scientific fields. In this talk, I will propose a framework for clarifying the language-thought relationship. I will introduce a distinction between formal competence—knowledge of linguistic rules and patterns—and functional competence—understanding and using language in the world. This distinction is grounded in human neuroscience, where a wealth of evidence indicates that formal competence relies on a set of specialized brain regions (“the language network”), whereas functional competence requires the use of multiple non-language-specific neural systems. I will then present a series of case studies illustrating how the formal/functional competence distinction can help (a) delineate the functional architecture of the human brain, providing a framework for studying complex cognitive behaviors, such as computer coding and legal reasoning; (b) understand the capabilities and limitations of today’s large language models, particularly in the realm of general world knowledge.”

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Leah Krubitzer | MacArthur Fellow Professor of Psychology | University of California, Davis
"Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes"

The neocortex is one of the most distinctive structures of the mammalian brain, yet also one of the most varied in terms of both size and organization. Multiple processes have contributed to this variability including evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., changes in gene sequence) that alter the size, organization and connections of the neocortex, and activity dependent mechanisms that can also modify these same features over shorter time scales. Because the neocortex does not develop or evolve in a vacuum, when considering how different cortical phenotypes emerge within a species and across species over time, it is also important to consider alterations to the body, to behavior, and the environment in which an individual develops. Thus, changes to the neocortex can arise via different mechanisms, and over multiple time scales. Brains can change across large, evolutionary time scales of thousands to millions of years; across shorter time scales such as generations; and across the life of an individual – day-by-day, within hours, minutes and even on a time scale of a second. The combination of genetic and activity dependent mechanisms that create a given cortical phenotype allows the mammalian neocortex to rapidly and flexibly adjust to different body and environmental contexts, and in humans permits culture to impact brain construction during development.

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Ivana Ilic | Music Theory, Emory University
Jasna Veličković | Composer and Performer

"How Do We Know It's Music? On Musical Capacities of the Electromagnetic Field"

What happens when the electromagnetic signal is not only deliberately made audible, but also exploited with a specifically musical aim? In this presentation, I investigate the distinctively musical use of electromagnetism in art from the 1960s until the present day. The two case studies include the works by Christina Kubisch (b. 1948) and Jasna Veličković (b. 1974). While the two artists share a commitment to a modernist quest for new sounds, they investigate the musical capacities of the electromagnetic field in distinctive ways. Kubisch operates primarily as a sound artist, within the audio-visual realm. Her installations include induction coils whose sounds are picked up by the visitors through specially designed headphones. The “musicality” of those works arises from the visitors’ movement within the exhibition space and appears as a completely individual and internalized event. As a composer, she also “finds” music in the sounding of electromagnetic fields that she explores in various places throughout the world. Veličković works from a predominantly auditory perspective. Her unambiguously musical creative process assumes both the compositional application of interference and its inclusion in a purposefully musical performance. The two artists’ approaches meet in an embodied reality of an intense and unique musical experience.

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Richard Moore | Executive Director, Children in Crossfire
"Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland"

Dr. Moore’s talk is part of the CMBC's Spring 2024 sponsored course “Empathy, Theater and Social Change” taught by Dr. Lisa Paulsen and Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva.

This lunch talk was Co-sponsored by Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics & Woodward Academy

“Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland”

Dr. Richard Moore was blinded at the age of ten by a British soldier during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1972. Despite this horrific experience, Richard chose forgiveness over revenge, and he later befriended the soldier who shot him. In this talk, Dr. Moore will share his powerful story of healing and reconciliation, exploring the various dimensions of forgiveness as an emotion, a disposition, and a decision, and the potential of forgiveness in mending communities torn apart by conflict. He will also discuss the role that “educating the heart” for empathy and compassion can play in overcoming hatred and division, drawing from his work with the nonprofit he founded, Children in Crossfire, and his forthcoming book Freedom in Forgiveness.

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Arkarup Banerjee | School of Biological Science / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY
"Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication: Insights from the Singing Mice."

My long-standing interest is to understand how circuits of interacting neurons give rise to natural, adaptive behaviors. Using vocal communication behavior across rodent species, my lab at CSHL pursues two complementary questions. How does the auditory system interact with the motor system to generate the fast sensorimotor loop required for vocal communication? What are the neural circuit modifications that allow behavioral novelty to emerge during evolution? In this talk, I will introduce you to the rich vocal life of the Costa-Rican singing mice. Next, I will describe a series of experiments that were performed to demonstrate the role of the motor cortex in controlling vocal flexibility in this species. In closing, I will discuss our ongoing efforts to identify neural circuit differences between singing mice and lab mice using high-throughput connectomics. Together, by combining neural circuit analysis of a natural behavior with comparative evolutionary analyses across species, we stand to gain insight into the function and evolution of neural circuits for social behaviors.

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Jack Gallant (Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science / University of California, Berkeley)
"The Distributed Conceptual Network in the Human Brain"

Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuous evaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie or listening to a story involve a range of different perceptual and cognitive processes whose underlying circuitry is broadly distributed across the brain. One important aspect of this system— the representation of conceptual knowledge in the brain—has been an intense topic of research in cognitive neuroscience for the past 40 years. A recent line of neuroimaging research from my lab has produced highly detailed, high-dimensional functional maps of modal and amodal (or multimodal) semantic representations in individual participants. Based on these findings, we propose a new Distributed Conceptual Network (DCN) theory that encompasses previous theories and accounts for recent data. The DCN theory holds that conceptual representations in the human brain are distributed across multiple modal sensory networks and (at least) one distributed amodal (or multimodal) conceptual network. Information from the modal sensory networks interfaces with the amodal network through a set of parallel semantically-selective channels. The amodal network is also influenced by information stored in long-term memory, which enters the network via the ATL. Finally, executive functions such as selective attention modulate conceptual representations depending on current behavioral goals and plans. We propose that the distributed conceptual system may be the scaffold for conscious experience and working memory, and that it subserves many diverse cognitive functions.

Jack Gallant is the Class of 1940 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and is a member of the programs in Neuroscience, Vision Science, Bioengineering and Biophysics. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and served as the 2022 Chair of the IEEE Brain Community. Professor Gallant's research focuses on high-resolution functional mapping and quantitative computational modeling of human brain networks. His lab has created the most detailed current functional maps of human brain networks mediating vision, language comprehension and navigation, and they have used these maps to decode and reconstruct perceptual experiences directly from brain activity. Further information about ongoing work in the Gallant lab, links to talks and papers and links to online interactive brain viewers can be found at http://gallantlab.org.

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Claire White | Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge
"An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion"

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for understanding religion, including why it appears so easily and why people are willing to fight―and die―for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. This talk provides an accessible overview of CSR, outlining key findings and debates that shape it.

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Harvey Whitehouse | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"Against Interpretive Exclusivism"

Interpretive exclusivism is the claim that studying cultural systems is exclusively an interpretive exercise, ruling out reductive explanation and scientific methods. Following the lead of Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, I will argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. By contrast, the intellectual benefits of combining interpretivist and scientific approaches are striking. By generating rich descriptive accounts of our social and cultural worlds using interpretive methods, we are better able to develop precise and testable hypotheses, increasing the value and relevance of a qualitative approach to the more quantitative branches of social science focusing on causal inference. Interpretive scholarship can also contribute to the design of experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, and database construction. By helping to strengthen the scientific foundations of social science, the interpretive enterprise can also make itself more relevant to society at large, to the policy community, and to the marginalized and oppressed groups it frequently purports to represent or defend. Since science is an inherently generalizing and inclusive activity, working more closely with the scientific community will help to make the methods of interpretive scholarship more transparent, reproducible, and accessible to all.

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Emma Cohen | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"From Social Synchrony To Social Energetics. Or, Why There's Plenty Left in the Tank"

Thirty years ago, in an article entitled Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity, Bob McCauley and Tom Lawson powerfully critiqued the “hermeneutic exclusivism” that by then prevailed in anthropology and the history of religions. When I read the article as a new doctoral student in anthropology, it blew my mind - and it helped me find my feet. In this talk, I’ll reflect on its seminal influence in my research within and beyond anthropology and religion and summarize some of our work on the causes and consequences of social bonding in a variety of contexts. Bob’s influence, much like the cognition in his accounts of religion and ritual, is by no means confined to the religious domain. Through his championing of an explanatory and naturalistic approach to religion, he has inspired “systematicity, generality, and testability” in accounts spanning human behaviour and culture across a wide range.

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Dimitris Xygalatas | Anthropology, University of Connecticut
"Ritual, Embodiment, and Emotional Contagion"

While the Cognitive Science of Religion has brought the mind to the forefront of analysis, it has had little to say about the body. As a result, the mechanisms underlying much-discussed and well-documented effects often remain elusive. In this paper, I will discuss ritual’s ability to facilitate the alignment of people’s bodies, actions, and emotions by presenting findings from an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods and discussing the implications of such findings for ritual’s role in promoting social coordination and group cohesion.

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Justin Barrett | President, Blueprint 1543
"Bringing Technology to Mind: Cognitive Naturalness and Technological Enthusiasm"

Sometimes new technologies spread before society has had sufficient time to evaluate them. Can we make better decisions about whether to be enthusiastic or reticent regarding new tech without waiting for thorough testing or the emergence of unintended negative consequences? In his book Why Religion Is Natural and Science Is Not (Oxford, 2011), Robert McCauley provides heuristic criteria for identifying the relative cognitive naturalness of various cultural forms and then applies these criteria to an analysis of religions and the sciences. I argue that McCauley’s distinction and criteria can also give some guidance regarding how enthusiastic we should be regarding new technologies, including artifacts and systems. The sciences fare well in such an analysis. Many social media platforms and some of newer artificial intelligence programs, however, should give us pause.

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E. Thomas Lawson | Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religion, Western Michigan University

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Mark Risjord | Director, Institute for Liberal Arts, Emory University + Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles pay a unique video tribute to their former mentor and friend, Robert McCauley on the occasion of his retirement.

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Pascal Boyer | Psychology & Anthropology, Washington University, St. Louis
"What Kinds of Religion are "Natural"?"

McCauley emphasized that religious representations are “natural”, in contrast to other cultural systems that require systematic training or leaning and institutional scaffolding. Pursuing this line of reasoning, we can see how some limited domains of religion are far more natural than others, in McCauley’s sense of that term. This could lead to a re-evaluation of some common tenets of the cognitive science of religion, propositions that we assume to apply to all forms of religious representations.

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Kareem Khalifa | Philosophy, University of California, Los Angeles
"The Methodenstreit Ain't Right: McCauley on Interpretation and Explanation"

Does interpretation distinguish the human sciences from the natural sciences? Or do explanations drive the human sciences in a manner akin to their more venerable natural-scientific cousins? These questions fueled the decades-old Methodenstreit (“methodological dispute”) about the foundations of the social sciences. Rising above the fray, McCauley has long endorsed interactionism, according to which interpretations and explanations of the same cultural-symbolic phenomenon are complements rather than competitors. He contrasts interactionism with exclusivism, which holds that only one of these approaches is applicable to cultural-symbolic phenomena, and inclusivism, which subordinates explanation to interpretation. However, all three of these positions assume that there is a nontrivial distinction between interpretation and explanation. By contrast, I will argue that putative examples of interpretations that defy explanation rely on overly restrictive conceptions of causation, lawlike generalizations, or perspective-taking in the natural sciences. As a result, all cultural-symbolic phenomena should be explained, though different explanations of those phenomena are still mutually beneficial in the ways that interactionism suggests.

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Bryon Cunningham | Psychology, Occidental College
"Evolution, Mood Disorders, and Religious Coping: Interactions Between Explanatory and Interpretive Theories in Clinical Practice"

In this talk, I advocate for the view that explanatory and interpretive theories can be mutually enriching in clinical practice. I start with the ecumenical view that the theoretical frameworks of evolutionary psychology and cultural evolutionary theory are both crucial for explaining human similarities and differences. I propose that developmental adaptations play an important role in understanding how the expression of human instincts is mediated by developmental contingencies. I construct a multi-dimensional conceptualization of mood variation and consider evidence from the emerging field of evolutionary psychopathology that mood variability is a biological adaptation. Next, I review the empirical research demonstrating the moderating effects of religious coping on mood disorders and on health more generally, and I offer some conjectures about ways in which mood variation may contribute to religious credibility-enhancing displays. Lastly, I explore a number of ways that explanatory and interpretive theories interact in clinical practice with patients with mood disorders and those who utilize religious coping.

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Jared Rothstein | Philosophy, Daytona State University
"Surfing, Sharks, & The Limits of Reason"

Based on personal experience surfing in the “Shark Bite Capital of the World” (Volusia County, Florida) and interdisciplinary research from the fields of behavioral economics, neuropsychology, and philosophy of mind, the author rejects the traditional Rationalist view that ‘future discounting’ is always unreasonable. He argues, on the contrary, that our natural tendency to opt for immediate rewards in the present can be rational, depending on the values and passions of the individual in question. Emotionally laden decisions are not inherently illogical; and when it comes to future discounting dilemmas, reason can furnish neither universal solutions that would apply to everyone nor certainty in advance. Rather, vexing problems of this type require leaps of probabilistic judgment—a major element of surfing—since we can never know exactly what the future holds.

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Charles Nussbaum | Philosophy, University of Texas, Austin
"Why Normative Ethics Is Natural and Metaethics Is and Is Not"

Morality prescribes privileged standards for action and character. Ethics is the philosophy of morality. Normative ethics codifies the prescriptive principles of morality that justify considered judgments of cases. Metaethics is the second-order study of ethics. It investigates the truth conditions of moral judgments and principles, the ontological commitments of moral principles, and the justification of these principles, as well as related metaphysical issues such as moral property supervenience, reductionism, and eliminativism, among other matters. Normative ethics, I argue, is maturationally natural, practiced natural, and reflectively natural. Metaethical positions, by contrast, range from the strongly natural to the strongly non-natural. Hence, metaethics is both natural and non-natural.

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Oliver Rollins | American Ethnic Studies / African American Studies / Sociology, University of Washington
"Towards an Anti-Racist Neuroscience: Possibilities and Problematics with Scientific Progress"

Alongside the deadly COVID-19 outbreak, the biomedical and health sciences have been altered by the continued challenge of racism. Major academic science journals (e.g., Nature, Science, and JAMA) have responded with calls to better recognize and combat the latent harms of (systemic) racism. Yet, it is still unclear what this new confrontation with scientific racism will look like or accomplish. In this talk, I will try to outline what is at stake; that is, both the social and ethical implications of dealing with the effects of racism in/through the (neuro)sciences. Emphasizing the ways in which racial inequality is reinforced through neuroscientific and technological practices, I hope to show how the haunting presence of race/racism in neuroscience research is a generative manifestation of the routine, obscure, and normative nature of systemic racism in larger US society. My goal is to convince us to think more critically and creatively about how to truly envision and enact an “anti-racist” (neuro)science of the future.

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Sashank Varma | Psychology and Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology
"Mathematical Concepts in Humans and Machine Learning Models"

The nature of mathematical concepts has long been a topic of philosophical debate. Recent theorizing in mathematical cognition has tended towards nativist accounts and postulations of built-in neural circuitry. In this talk, I consider whether this status quo is being challenged by the emergence of machine learning models capable of near-human levels of performance at predicting text and classifying images. Ongoing research in my lab is finding that these models induce latent representations of numerical and geometric concepts that are similar to those found in humans, for example, the mental number line. I will review several of these projects. I will also preview our future work, where we are moving beyond the cognitive alignment of machine learning models to evaluate their developmental alignment by training language models on developmentally calibrated corpora. The goal of this new work is first to model typical numerical development and then to perturb these typical models to shed light on developmental dyscalculia.

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Using the Science of Love and Bonding to Bring New Perspectives on Social Relationships, Health, and the Practice of Female Genital Mutilation in East Africa.

Larry Young | Center for Translational Social Neuroscience | Psychiatry, Emory University Rev. Patti Ricotta | President, Life Together International Discussants: Kathryn M. Yount | Global Health and Melvin Konner | Anthropology, Emory University

Larry Young and Rev. Patti Ricotta will discuss their work in Uganda, Kenya and Tanzania in which Dr. Young discusses the neurobiology of pair bonding in monogamous voles as well as other research on the biology of healthy social relationships to community leaders, clergy, medical professionals and educators in communities where female genital mutilation is practiced. In areas where spirituality is highly venerated, this approach based on combining scientific research with relevant biblical teaching, is bringing new perspectives on the importance of mutual loving relationships between partners as well as between parent and child. The importance of pleasurable sex in pair bonding brings into question the cultural practice of FGM. Rev. Ricotta shares her biblical perspective which encourages greater equality between men and women, husbands and wives by showing the consistency between biblical messages of love and unity, with Dr. Young's scientific research on the neurobiology of pair bonding. This combination has caused a paradigm shift in the thinking of thousands with regard to FGM and parenting.

These presentations will be followed by discussions on ethical and cultural considerations of using this approach to change long standing cultural practices in Africa.

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"Can 'Wild' Sounds Teach Us What it Means to be Human?"
David Haskell | Biology & Environmental Sciences | University of the South, Sewanee, TN

Presented by hosts Laura Emmery (Department of Music / Emory University) and Cynthia Willett (Department of Philosophy / Emory University) Co-sponsored by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and The Department of Psychology.

"I will use examples from the history of sound on Earth to argue that the world’s sonic diversity – both human and nonhuman – undermines ideas of human exceptionalism. Turning our ears toward these sounds also provides a useful foundation for ethical discernment. Listening to insects, birds, and trees, then, is a radical (from the root, radix) act because it places us in relationship with other species and with processes that transcend human concerns. We hear these connections in human sound, too, especially in instrumental music which, from the start, has been an ecologically immersive art."

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Simple Interactions Construct Complex Communication in Songbirds and Human Infants

Despite the immense variety of sounds we associate with the animal world, the ability to learn a vocal repertoire is a rare phenomenon, emerging in only a handful of groups, including humans. To gain a better understanding of the development and evolution of vocal learning, we will examine the processes by which birds learn to sing and human infants learn to talk. A key parallel in the vocal development of birds and babies is the social function of immature vocalizations. The responses of adults to the plastic song of birds and the babbling of babies create social feedback that guides the young towards mature vocalizations. I will present experiments demonstrating how the immature sounds of young birds and babies regulate and are regulated by social interactions. The form and timing of these interactions have strong influences on the development of mature birdsong and language. The difficulty of measuring rapid social interchanges organized by immature vocalizing has led many to overlook their importance and assume that young songbirds and human infants learn by passive exposure followed by motor practice. My data indicate that vocal learning is an active, socially-embedded process. By creating feedback that is both inherently informative and socially relevant, structured social interaction boosts the salience of acoustic patterns in the input and facilitates learning of speech and song.

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Have you thought about applying to the NSF Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER)? These prestigious awards can provide a major boost to your career and require an integration of education and research activities different from more conventional research grant applications.

If you’d like to learn more about this program and how to put together a successful application, please join us for a public discussion and informal Q&A with two recent Emory awardees, Dr. Joyce Ho (Computer Science) and Dr. John Lindo (Anthropology)

Timing cues:
0:09 Introduction, Dietrich Stout, CMBC Director
1:02 What is an NSF Early Career Grant?
2:20 Introduction of Joyce Ho and John Lindo
3:56 Is this the right grant?
4:59 Should you volunteer to serve on an NSF panel? What are panels looking for?
13:55 Collaboration and stages of putting your program together
16:04 Educational component and innovations
18:30 NSF vs. NIH
18:57 What do panelist want to know?
19:15 At what point in your career should you apply?
25:03 How is the "educational component" assessed?
28:55 How much should you budget for education? Budget discussion
31:50 What kind of feedback do you get? How to revise for resubmission
33:37 Who should target a CAREER vs. other grant mechanisms? For what?
39:45 How to develop a five year plan?

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Keynote Address | The Evolution of Culture and Technology Mini Symposium | Tel Aviv University 

The simple fact of tool-making no longer provides a sharp dividing line between “Man the Tool-Maker” and the rest of the animal world. It is now clear that many other species make and use tools, and that distinctly human technology emerged through a long, multi-lineal, and meandering evolutionary process rather than the crossing of some critical threshold. However, it would be a mistake to underestimate the transformative effects of technology on everything from our hands and brains to our reproductive strategies and social organization. Understanding this complex and contingent evolutionary history will require simultaneous attention to particularistic details and more generalizable processes and relationships. In this lecture, I provide a critical review of evolutionary approaches to technology and, drawing on evidence from my own lab’s experimental neuroarchaeology studies of stone tool making, advance a “Perceptual Motor Hypothesis” proposing that human technological cognition has been evolutionarily and developmentally constructed from ancient primate perceptual-motor systems for body awareness and engagement with the world.  

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Vernelle A. A. Noel | Architecture & Interactive Computing | Georgia Institute of Technology

Craft practices and communities carry histories and cultures of people, knowledges, innovations, and social ties. Some reasons for their disappearance include dying practitioners, lacking pedagogy, changing practices, and technocentric developments. How might we employ computation in the restoration, remediation, and reconfiguration of these practices, knowledges, and communities? How might social and cultural values and practices shape cognitive abilities and creative expressions? How might investigations in these practices at the intersection of culture, cognition, and material inform our conceptualizations and understanding of the human mind? In this talk, I present research in the dying craft of wire-bending, and the diasporic design practice of the Trinidad and Tobago Carnival to answer some of these questions. By employing design/ making, computation, and ethnographic methods as forms of inquiry, I will share new computational tools, research frameworks, and expressions that address problems in this context, and reveal new dimensions and possibilities for how we think about craft, computation, and culture. 

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Karen Adolph | Psychology and Neural Science | New York University 

All behavior is movement—walking, talking, reaching, eating, looking, touching—all of it. Motor behavior is foundational for learning and doing in everyday life. Most important for functional movement is behavioral flexibility—the ability to tailor movements to local conditions. Where does flexible, functional behavior come from? I argue that complex, intelligent behavior emerges in real time and over development from immense amounts of varied, time-distributed, error-filled practice perceiving, planning, and acting in a changing body with changing skills in a changing world. Perception guides movement and movement gives rise to perceptual information. So planning involves obtaining information for perceptual systems and using perceptual information to decide what to do next.

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Tobias Overath | Psychology and Neuroscience | Duke University

Speech perception entails the transformation of the acoustic waveform that reaches our ears to linguistic representations (e.g., syntax, semantics) to enable communication. The nature of this acousto-linguistic transformation - how different acoustic properties of the speech signal are processed throughout the auditory system and then interface with linguistic representations - is still not fully understood. I will present data from a series of fMRI studies from my lab that allow the explicit dissociation of acoustic analyses and linguistic analyses of temporal speech structure, using a novel 'speech quilting' algorithm that controls the temporal structure of speech. The results suggest that superior temporal sulcus (STS) and left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) play important roles in the acousto-linguistic transformation of temporal speech structure.

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Andrew Buskell | Public Policy | Georgia Institute of Techonology

The current consensus in cultural evolution is that cumulative cultural evolution (“CCE”) set hominins apart: capacities for CCE are distinctive to hominins and help explain their geographic spread and evolutionary success. CCE is an intuitive idea: cultural traits are modified upon over time as they are learned by others—and these modifications can generate traditions of extraordinary complexity, adaptiveness, and economy. Yet this intuitive idea has been remarkably hard to operationalize and define. A key reason for is that work on CCE is “lumped”, adopting a general and coarse-grained analysis of phenomena. It is lumped because researchers focus on explaining paradigmatic cases of cumulative cultural change—notably, the technologies and skills of Holocene-era hominins. But to understand the role of CCE in explaining hominin evolution, one needs to look at the margins of the concept’s applicability in early hominins and non-human animals. Looking at the margin reveals some surprises. One recent result suggests that Guinea baboons (Papio papio) display characteristic features of CCE in laboratory environments. This is surprising given the lack of anecdotal evidence about baboon culture in the wild, and how such a claim would force a revision in current narratives about the hominin cognitive evolution. I’ll be suggesting that these claims have some truth to them—but don’t carry any radical implications. To show this, I’ll be distinguishing between three kinds of cumulative cultural change: (i) socially scaffolded task optimization, (ii) domain parsing and organization, and (iii) technological recombination and affordance matching. Using these distinctions, I argue the work on Guinea baboons is meant to show their capacity for domain parsing. Yet I’ll also be arguing that the evidence is much more indicative of the less cognitively demanding socially scaffolded task optimization.

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Kathryn Kadous, the Schaefer Chaired Professor of Accounting and Director and Associate Dean of PhD Program in the Goizueta Business School at Emory University talks with Lynne Nygaard, the recent past-director of the CMBC and current Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology at Emory, discuss her research into the judgement and decision-making issues in auditing and accounting and spotlights some of her favorite insights. 

https://goizueta.emory.edu/faculty/profiles/kathryn-kadous

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Frans de Waal (Director of the Living Links Center and C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology, Emory University) sits down for a discussion with the CMBC former-Director, Lynne Nygaard (Professor and Chair, Department of Psychology, Emory University) and Dietrich Stout (CMBC Director and Professor in the Department of Anthropology, Emory University) to discuss his research, career, and recent book, "Different, Gender Through the Eyes of a Primatologist" (https://bookshop.org/books/different-gender-through-the-eyes-of-a-primatologist/9781324007104)

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Robert Liu is the new Associate Director of the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, a Professor of Biology and an Affiliate Scientist at the Emory National Primate Research Center. He is interviewed about his research in his Computational Neuroethology Lab by CMBC Director and Professor of Anthropology, Dietrich Stout.

• Bio Page
• Robert Liu Lab Website
• National Primate Research Center

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Humans and Proboscideans (the taxonomic order of elephants as well as several extinct animals such as mammoth) have shared habitats across the Old and New Worlds during the past two million years, starting with the appearance of the Genus Homo in Africa and following the dispersals of humans to other continents. Proboscideans were included in the human diet starting from the Lower Paleolithic and continued until the final stages of the Pleistocene, providing humans with both meat and, especially, fat. Meat eating, large-game hunting and food-sharing appeared in Africa some two million years ago and these practices were accompanied and supported by growing social complexity and cooperation. This argument emphasizes the dependency of early humans on calories derived from mega herbivores through the hunting of large and medium-sized animals as a fundamental and very early adaptation mode of Lower Paleolithic humans, and the possible emergence of social and behavioral mechanisms that appeared at these early times. Moreover, elephants and mammoths probably also had cosmological and ontological significance for humans, as their bones were used to produce artifacts resembling the iconic Lower Paleolithic stone handaxe, in addition to their representations in Upper Paleolithic "art." Elephants and mammoths were not only habitat companions, most probably conceived as non-human persons, but were also included in the human diet, beginning with the emergence of Homo erectus in Africa and up until the final stages of the Pleistocene with the extinction of proboscideans in Europe, America and most parts of Asia I will suggest a possible nexus between the two iconic hallmarks of the Lower Paleolithic period: the elephant and the handaxe and will discuss its significance in understanding human adaptation, lifeways and cosmology.

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Drawing upon data from an ongoing ethnographic study of embodiment and emotion in everyday interaction among cohabitating couples in the U.S., this presentation engages with key theoretical and methodological questions involved in conducting ethnographic research at the intersection of linguistic and biocultural anthropology. My discussion, specifically, focuses on video-recordings of naturally occurring interaction in couples’ homes alongside time-matched psychophysiological data on moment-to-moment shifts in each partners’ respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) —an aspect of heart rate variability (HRV)—gathered with a mobile impedance cardiography device (Mindware Technologies, Ltd. Westerville, OH). In analyzing video data, I demonstrate how the theories and methods of linguistic anthropology complicate a quantitative approach to emotion-in-interaction that often hinges upon the identification of specific, discrete “emotions” and/or designation of particular interactions as either “conflict” or “agreement” (see, e.g., Gottman & Driver 2005, Cribbit 2013, Han et al. 2021). Emphasizing the co-emergence of emotion-in-interaction, this talk thus foregrounds the multimodal ways in which talk-in-interaction constitutes an intersubjective, embodied process of co-operative action as people variably orient to being co-present with one another in any environment (Goodwin 2018). Asking how couples’ RSA values, as quantitative data, might complement and/or productively complicate rather than “reduce” such an analysis, this talk thus centers the question of how we might unsettle the binary between quantia and qualia in ethnographic research more broadly (Shweder 1996).

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Moral outrage shapes fundamental aspects of social life and is now widespread in online social networks. How does social media change the expression of moral outrage and its social consequences? Drawing on evidence from neuroeconomics, I will develop a theory that social media platforms amplify moral outrage by exploiting our capacity to learn from social rewards. Data from observational studies of millions of social media posts and behavioral experiments confirm that social rewards amplify moral outrage at the level of individual users. I’ll then present evidence for several troubling consequences of amplified digital outrage: it facilitates the spread of misinformation, exacerbates hate speech and networked harassment, and inflates collective beliefs about intergroup hostility. I’ll conclude with a discussion of the ethical and policy implications of these findings.

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Communication is inherently social and requires an efficient exchange of complex cues between individuals. What are the behavioral and neural processes that allow people to understand, couple to, and learn from others in complex, everyday interactions? My research examines the interpersonal dynamics of communication across the lifespan using behavioral, computational, and dual-brain neuroimaging techniques in real-life environments. To understand the real-time dynamics of communication between children and caregivers at the biological level, I have used brain-to-brain coupling as a measure of interpersonal alignment to predict communicative success and learning outcomes. In one study, we found that activation in the infant prefrontal cortex preceded and drove similar activation in the adult brain, a result that advances our understanding of children’s influence over the accommodative behaviors of caregivers. In other work, we have found that both pupillary synchrony and neural synchrony while listening to stories predicts preschoolers’ learning of new words. In ongoing work, we are quantifying the semantic structure of naturalistic speech and measuring how it relates to dynamic neural representations. This collection of findings provides a new understanding of how children’s and adults’ brains and behaviors both shape and reflect each other during everyday communication.

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Universal human rights are defined by international agreements, law, foreign policy, and the concept of inherent human dignity.  However, rights defined on this basis can be readily subverted by overt and covert disagreements and can be treated as distant geopolitical events rather than bearing on individuals’ everyday lives.  A robust case for universal human rights is urgently needed and must meet several disparate requirements: (a) a framework that resolves tautological definitions reached solely by mutual, revocable agreement; (b) a rationale that transcends differences in beliefs, creed and culture; and (c) a personalization that empowers both individuals and governments to further human rights protections.  We propose that human rights in existing agreements comprise five elemental types: (1) agency, autonomy and self-determination; (2) freedom from want; (3) freedom from fear; (4) uniqueness; and (5) unconditionality, including protections for vulnerable populations.  We further propose these rights and protections are rooted in fundamental properties of the human brain.  We provide a robust, empirical foundation for universal rights based on emerging work in human brain science that we term ‘dignity neuroscience’.  Dignity neuroscience provides an empirical foundation to support and foster human dignity, universal rights and their active furtherance by individuals, nations, and international law.

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Romantic bonds reinforce our health and well-being while their sudden loss is highly detrimental. To identify the neural and genetic mechanisms that contribute to the positive physiological effects of social bonds, my laboratory has taken advantage of the unique behavioral repertoire of monogamous prairie voles. Unlike laboratory rats and mice, prairie voles form life-long pair bonds and exhibit distress upon partner separation. In this seminar, I will focus on recent work delineating transcriptional signatures of pair bonding and partner loss as an example of how we have leveraged our research on bond formation to understand the neural processes that enable recovery from loss. Ultimately, I anticipate that this work will lead to novel ways in which we can harness the positive biological effects of social bonds and ameliorate the emotional pain and harmful health consequences of loss.

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Aubrey Kelly, Assistant Professor of Psychology at Emory University talks with Dietrich Stout, Assistant Director of the CMBC about her work in https://www.thekellylab.org/

http://psychology.emory.edu/home/people/faculty/kelly-aubrey.html

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There is no eating in the archive. This is not only a practical admonition to any would-be researcher but also a methodological challenge, in that there is no eating—or, at least, no food—preserved among the printed records of the early United States. Synthesizing a range of textual artifacts with accounts (both real and imagined) of foods harvested, dishes prepared, and meals consumed, this talk—based on An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020)—will reveal how a focus on eating allows us to rethink the nature and significance of aesthetics in early America, as well as of its archive. Klein will tell the story of how eating emerged as an aesthetic activity over the course of the eighteenth century and how it subsequently transformed into a means of expressing both allegiance and resistance to the dominant Enlightenment worldview. Accounts of the enslaved men and women who cooked the meals of the nation’s founders—from Thomas Jefferson’s emancipation agreement with his enslaved chef to Malinda Russell’s Domestic Cookbook, the first African American-authored culinary text of its kind--help show how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States.

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Unpacking the nature of emotions is critical to a scientific understanding of the human condition.  Recent evidence reveals that emotion categories contain considerable neural, physiological and behavioral variation, challenging long-held views of emotions. Consistent with these broad patterns, I will present research highlighting diversity in perceptions of emotion across societies and individuals. This research is informed by the constructionist proposal that culturally learned knowledge may account for the discrete and functional nature of emotions. I will suggest that the functioning of the conceptual system (what we "know" about emotions) serves as a source of both variation and consistency across levels. To illustrate, I will present ongoing research examining synchrony in emotion perception across individuals and outline the future directions of this approach.

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Empathy allows us to understand and share one another’s emotional experiences. It allows one to quickly and automatically relate to the emotional states of others, which is essential for the regulation of social interactions and cooperation toward shared goals. Behavioral and neuroimaging findings have led researchers to identify two broad types of empathic reactions. One is emotional empathy, which is characterized by feeling other people’s emotions. The other is cognitive empathy, which is characterized by understanding other people’s thoughts and motivations. Despite the developments in the study of empathy, the vast majority of empathy paradigms focus only on passive observers, carrying out artificial empathy tasks in socially deprived environments. This approach significantly limits our understanding of interactive aspects of empathy and how empathic responses affect the distress of the sufferer.

We recently proposed a brain model that characterizes how empathic reactions alleviate the distress of a target.In a series of experiments, we examined brain-to-brain coupling during empathic interactions. We show that, brain-to-brain coupling in the observation-execution (mirror) brain network increases in empathic interactions. Critically we found that brain-to-brain coupling predicts distress regulation in the target. We conclude that employing this multi-brain approach may provide a highly controlled setting in which to study social behavior in health and disease.

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Presented by Music Department, Emory University with co-sponsorships by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, Hightower Fund, Department of Philosophy, Department of Film and Media, and the Department of German Studies.

In certain languages the words for “history” and “story” are the same, as in French (histoire) or Russian (история). There are of course differences. “History” usually implies an accurate account of past events, a summary of what happened over a period a time, while “story” usually refers to events that may or may not accurately reflect on the past, embellished as necessary by the “storyteller.” But in this distinction race is rarely mentioned. Anyone, irrespective of race, can write histories or tell stories, yet with remarkable consistency in the academic study of music in the U.S., our histories have been written by white persons, usually men, passing from generation to generation with little divergence from the main narratives of “great works” of the “western canon.” And when a nonwhite voice challenges the white narrative, efforts to stifle that voice are swift and sever, and all too often whiteness will accuse nonwhiteness of “storytelling,” a common critique of Critical Race Theory these days. In short, white persons write histories, while nonwhite persons tell stories. In this talk I’ll expand on music’s histories and stories, and explain why, in fact, the common American music curriculum is still quite segregated along racial lines, like much of the country writ large, mostly because of the distinction between history and story. I’ll then suggest that we don’t need to “decolonize” the music curriculum—that’s too vague—but, rather, that we need to desegregate it and foreground race in our discussions so that all racial musics, and musical races, have a seat at the table and a voice in the conversation.

PHILIP EWELL is Professor Music Theory at Hunter College of the City University of New York. His specialties include Russian music theory, Russian opera, modal theory, and race studies. His work has been featured in news outlets such as the BBC, Die Zeit, NPR, and the New Yorker. He received the 2019–2020 “Presidential Award for Excellence in Creative Work” at Hunter College, and he was the “Susan McClary and Robert Walser Fellow” of the American Council of Learned Societies for 2020–2021. He recently finished a monograph combining race studies with music and music theory and is working on a forthcoming book (at W.W. Norton) as coauthor of a new music theory textbook that will be a modernized, reframed, and inclusive textbook based on recent developments in music theory pedagogy.

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Loneliness is everybody’s business. Neither a pathology, nor a rare affliction, it is part of the human condition. Severe and chronic loneliness, however, is a threat to individual and public health and appears to be on the rise. In 2018, U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May said, “Loneliness is one of the greatest public health challenges of our time,” and appointed the country’s first ever Minister for Loneliness. Contemporary scholarship is therefore focusing on loneliness not as merely an individual matter, but as a public health issue that negatively impacts both physical and psychological health, even increasing the risk of mortality. This talk examines what is and is not loneliness, conditions of the “lonely society” and the role of culture in loneliness. Based on my long-term ethnographic studies, I point to how society itself can exacerbate experiences of loneliness. One of the most important messages of this talk, is that the anatomy of loneliness is not the anatomy of a single individual, but of a type of society. Link to 

The Anatomy of Loneliness: https://www.amazon.com/Anatomy-Loneliness-Contemporary-Ethnographic-Subjectivity/dp/0520383494/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=chikako+ozawa+de+silva+the+anatomy+of+loneliness&qid=1632521910&sr=8-1

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Musicians ubiquitously apply spatial metaphors when describing the stability hierarchy established by tonal syntax: stable tones are considered spatially central and, as gravitational foci, spatially lower. We investigated whether listeners, musicians and non-musicians, indeed associate tonal relationships with visuospatial dimensions, including spatial height, centrality, laterality, and size, and whether such mappings are consistent with tonal discourse. We examined explicit and implicit associations. In the explicit paradigm, participants heard a tonality-establishing prime followed by a probe tone and coupled each probe with a subjectively appropriate location on a two-dimensional grid (Exp. 1) or with one of 7 circles differing in size (Exp. 4). The implicit paradigm used a version of the Implicit Association Test to examine associations of tonal stability with vertical position (Exp. 2), lateral position (Exp. 3) and object size (Exp. 5). Tonal stability was indeed associated with perceived physical space: the spatial distances between the locations associated with different scale-degrees significantly correlated with the tonal stability differences between these scale degrees. However, inconsistently with the hypotheses implied by musical discourse, stable tones were associated with leftward and higher spatial positions, relative to unstable tones, rather than with central and lower spatial positions. We speculate that these mappings are influenced by emotion, embodying the “good is up” metaphor, and by the spatial structure of music keyboards. Taken together, results suggest that abstract syntactical relationships may consistently map onto concrete perceptual dimensions across modalities, demonstrating a new type of cross-modal correspondence and a hitherto under-researched connotative function of musical structure.

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Chikako Ozawa de-Silva talks with Dietrich Stout about her research and upcoming book "The Anatomy of Loneliness"

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Stephanie Koziej talks with Dietrich Stout about her work and upcoming gallery show, "Tender Rhythms"
Stephanie Koziej, PhD is an award-winning interdisciplinary researcher, artist, educator, curator and activist working on the intersection of the humanities, arts, science and technology. Specialized in theorizing intimate connections through interactive art installations, with the use of brain-computer-interface, sound and visuals. Looking for a new opportunity to continue my research and teach young artists the foundations of critical theory, to subvert problematic ideologies through their own artistic practice. (https://koziejstephanie.com/)

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Most of us crave new experiences and sensations. Whether it's our attraction to that new burger place or the latest gadget, newness tugs at us. But what about those who can't seem to get enough? They jump out of planes, climb skyscrapers, and will eat anything (even poisonous pufferfish)… Prompting others to ask 'what's wrong' with them. These are high sensation-seekers and they crave intense experiences, despite physical, or social risk. They don't have a death wish, but seemingly a need for an adrenaline rush, no matter what. In this talk, Dr. Carter explores the lifestyle, psychology, and neuroscience behind adrenaline junkies and daredevils. This tendency, or compulsion, has a role in our culture, but where is the line between healthy and unhealthy thrill-seeking and what can we all learn from thrill seekers?

RELATED: Ken Carter Interview "Inside the Lab"

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Although most scientists nowadays would not argue that brains of males and females belong to two distinct types, the binary framework still dominates thinking about the relations between sex and the brain. I’ll describe challenges to the binary formulation of these relations and how this formulation has evolved in response to these challenges, with the latest version claiming that brains are typically male or female because brain structure can be used to predict the sex category (female/male) of the brain’s owner. I will also present several lines of evidence revealing that sex category explains only a small part of the variability in human brain structure, and a recent study challenging the masculinization hypothesis. I suggest to replace the binary framework with a new, non-binary, framework, according to which mosaic brains reside in a multi-dimensional space that cannot meaningfully be reduced to a male-female continuum or to a binary variable. This framework may also apply to sex-related variables and has implications for research.

Panel Discussion with Daphna Joel and Lise Eliot | moderated by Donna Maney and Katrina Karkazis.
Click here to start video at Panel Discussion

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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According to Elliot Turiel, religious affiliation does not influence the distinction between so-called “moral" and “conventional” norms. By contrast, according to Jonathan Haidt, religious affiliation results in a broadened moral domain: As he puts it, “big gods have big moralities." This talk will present new data showing the limits of both Turiel's and Haidt’s views. The scope of the moral domain is neither fixed nor is simply broadened by religion. A more sophisticated understanding of the relation between religion and morality is thus called for.

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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An emerging body of work in cognitive philosophy and computational neuroscience depicts human brains as prediction machines – multi-level networks that specialize in using generative models to both match and anticipate the evolving stream of sensory information. However, the relationship between these posited cascades of prediction and conscious human experience itself remains unclear. Recent work in computational psychiatry provides important clues. For example, it is thought that malfunctions in hierarchical inference can explain core patterns of alteration seen in autism and schizophrenia, and can shed new light on so-called ‘psychogenic’ symptoms - functional impairments without standard organic causes. Such accounts reveal the deep continuities between perception and hallucination and may help reveal common processing motifs underlying both typical and atypical forms of human experience.

Co-sponsored by The Hightower Fund and Emory Department of Psychology

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Jinho Choi talks with Lynne Nygaard about his research and lab.

BIO
Jinho Choi is an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science, the Department of Quantitative Theory and Methods, and the Program in Linguistics at Emory University. He conducted his postdoctoral research at the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 2014 with Andrew McCallum. He was a full-time lecturer in the Department of Computer Science at the Korea Military Academy from 2004 to 2007 while he was serving his military duty in South Korea.

He was a R&D team lead of the Amelia project, the next generation machine reading system developed at IPsoft Inc. He is the founder of the Natural Language Processing Research lab at Emory University.

Jinho Choi has been active in research on natural language processing; especially, on the optimization of low-level NLP (e.g., dependency parsing, named entity recognition, sentiment analysis) for robustness on various data and scalability on large data.

He has developed an open source project called NLP4J, providing NLP components with state-of-the-art accuracy and speed, which has been widely used for both academic and industrial research.

His current research focuses on the development of NLP components for different domains (e.g., social media, radiology reports, dialogs) and the applications of these NLP components for end-user systems such as question-answering, character mining, text generation, etc. He is also interested in interdisciplinary research where NLP can enhance researches in other areas.

EDUCATION
Ph.D., Joint Degree in Computer Science and Cognitive Science, University of Colorado at Boulder, 2012

• M.S.E., Computer and Information Science, University of Pennsylvania, 2003
• B.A., Dual Degree in Mathematics and Computer Science, Coe College, 2001

RESEARCH

My research focuses on the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) for "robustness" on diverse data and "scalability" on large data. The goal is to develop NLP models that are readily available for interdisciplinary research. I believe that NLP models we develop will open up many new opportunities to conduct innovative research. All our models are publicly available through our open-source project. * In 2019, I started a new project, Emora, to develop a chatbot that aims to be a social companion who cares about you, learns from you, and shares thoughts and feelings with you. Our team has been selected as one of the 10 participants of the Alexa Prize Socialbot Grand Challenge 3. The goal is to develop a chatbot that helps people with mental illness such as depression or Alzheimer's Disease through natural conversations. * In 2018, we started developing a cloud-based NLP platform called ELIT, Evolution of Language and Information Technology, that brings the latest NLP technology into the cloud. Researchers can take advantage of the ELIT platform through web-APIs, which requires no installation on local machines and minimum knowledge in any programming language, while developers can contribute to the platform by deploying their own models. * In 2015, I started a new project, Character Mining, aiming to extract implicit and explicit information about individual characters in multiparty dialogue. The goal is to develop a machine comprehension system that understands entity-centric contexts from human conversations and helps us reason better about those contexts. This project has many novel tasks such as character identification, emotion detection, reading comprehension, question answering, and personality detection.

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Benjamin Wilson talks with Dietrich Stout about his research and lab.

BIO
Benjamin Wilson received his BSc in Psychology from the University of York, UK, in 2005, before completing an MSc in Evolutionary Psychology from the University of Liverpool, UK, in 2008. In 2014, he completed his PhD in Neuroscience at Newcastle University, using behavioral and neuroimaging approaches to directly compare artificial grammar learning in humans and macaque and marmoset monkeys. After a short postdoctoral position, he was awarded a Sir Henry Wellcome Research Fellowship to study the cognitive and neural systems supporting language-relevant processes in humans and monkeys. He joined Emory University in 2020, where his lab takes a comparative approach, studying humans and nonhuman primates to explore the evolution of cognition and communication, and the origins of human language.

RESEARCH INTERESTS
Comparative cognition, cross-species neuroimaging, language evolution, communication, cooperation, implicit learning, statistical learning.

RESEARCH AREAS
As a comparative cognitive scientist, my research focuses on questions about what makes humans unique in the animal kingdom, and conversely, where might we have more in common with nonhuman primates than we might expect? I am particularly interested in the evolution of language, which is a human ability that appears remarkably different to forms of communication available to other nonhuman animals. However, my research asks whether some aspects of language may be supported by domain-general systems that might also exist in other species. My previous research has shown that some of the cognitive mechanisms and neural systems that support and underpin human linguistic abilities may be shared with closely related nonhuman animals.

Research in the Wilson lab has a number of key goals. Firstly, we aim to identify core cognitive computations that support aspects of language learning and processing (using statistical learning, sequence processing, implicit learning and memory tasks). These can then be directly related to linguistic abilities in healthy populations of human adults and children, as well as clinical and subclinical populations (e.g., aphasia, dyslexia, etc.). The lab uses a range of experimental paradigms to test humans and nonhuman primates using the same behavioral methods (e.g., habituation/dishabituation paradigms, eye tracking, testing with touchscreen computers). These studies aim to help us understand which cognitive abilities might be evolutionarily conserved across species, and which might represent unique human specializations.

Finally, we use neuroscientific approaches (including neuroimaging such as fMRI, DTI and EEG, and brain stimulation like TMS or TUS) to directly compare brain responses in humans and monkeys, to identify whether similar behaviors in these species are supported by the same or different neural systems. This work has the potential not only to provide insights about human evolution and the origins of language, but identifying evolutionarily conserved abilities is also critical to develop nonhuman primates as an animal model system in which to better understand these shared cognitive and neural systems.

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Translation is often thought of as a transparent, objective act in which words from a source language are rendered into a target language, thereby carrying a message into new linguistic territory. Theorists, practitioners and lay readers argue tirelessly over the success or failure of various translations and their degree of (in-)fidelity. In this talk, I would like to begin from the premise that an instrumentalist view of translation will by default always evaluate target texts through a rhetoric of loss (Venuti). More useful is an a priori appreciation of translation as a creative, authorial act. To this end, I will explore connotation and subjectivity in literary translation, with several examples from contemporary Hispanophone literature.

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Groups adopt strikingly different attitudes and practices centered on how humans and other living beings relate to their environment. These bodies of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) have been the focus of extensive research in ethnobiology. Understanding TEK is important both theoretically and for advancing political projects such as ecological conservation and cooperative resource management. However, attempts to integrate insights from TEK with scientific biological thought often misconstrue its content and function. Ethnobiology frequently represents TEK as a cultural module that can be cleanly separated from religious, symbolic, or mythic beliefs, rites and practices, and material culture. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous botanical and zoological TEK, I argue that knowledge of the natural world does not constitute a cultural domain that can be carved off and represented in isolation. This claim is bolstered by psychological studies of belief in ritual efficacy and causal explanations of natural phenomena. In everyday cognition, natural and “supernatural” ontologies are thoroughly entwined. I propose some heuristics for advancing piecemeal ontological coordination among Indigenous stakeholders, ethnobiologists, and conservationists. These heuristics aim at facilitating cooperation while preserving difference across systems of knowledge and value.

VIDEO LINK

CLICK HERE FOR LINKS TO RELATED PAPERS: http://cmbc.emory.edu/events/lectures/index.html

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For millennia, sociocultural complexity increased (and occasionally decreased) gradually over many human generations, as people inherited traditional knowledge within kin-based local communities. In these settings, where knowledge was shared within populations and across generations, selection was probably the key driver in norms of human adaptive behavior. In the 21st century, however, knowledge is transmitted across populations and within generations — and evolutionary patterns may resemble random drift more than selection in increasingly many settings. To span these different scales and modes of cultural evolution, different representations are useful, including fitness landscapes and a heuristic representing the transparency of payoffs in social learning. Using examples from computational social science, I will discuss how cultural evolution may have profoundly changed from the ancient past to present-day.

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Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are highly related as shown by labs around the world and in any populations. My recent work demonstrates that individual differences in ability to control attention underlies this relationship. Attention control is both a state and a trait variable. Measures of attention control are highly reliable and valid predictors of performance in multitasking and other complex cognitive tasks. In addition, environmental variables such as sleep deprivation and psychopathology lead to reduced capability to control attention which can, in turn, lead to reduced cognitive ability.

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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How many published articles and grant awards would you like to add to your CV this year? The more the better, right? But is life in the fast lane really the best way to do science?

In her Trends in Cognitive Science (January 2020, vol. 24, no. 1) article, Uta Frith (University College, London) asserts that Fast Science is bad for scientists and for science. She provides suggestions for ways in which researchers might pursue Slow Science and make faster progress as a result. Slow Science may also lead to a shift in research culture that is more sustainable and healthier for researchers.

LINK TO PAPER

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Lauren Klein interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

Lauren Klein is an associate professor in the Departments of English and Quantitative Theory & Methods at Emory University. She received her A.B. from Harvard University and her Ph.D. from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her research interests include digital humanities, data science, data studies, and early American literature. In 2017, she was named one of the “rising stars in digital humanities” by Inside Higher Ed.

Klein is currently at work on two major projects: the first, Data by Design, is an interactive book on the history of data visualization. Awarded an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication, Data by Design emphasizes how the modern visualizing impulse emerged from a set of complex intellectually and politically-charged contexts in the United States and across the Atlantic.

The second project, tentatively titled Vectors of Freedom, employs a range of quantitative methods in order to surface the otherwise invisible forms of labor, agency, and action involved in the abolitionist movement of the nineteenth-century United States.

Klein is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). This book shows how thinking about eating can help to tell new stories about the range of people, from the nation’s first presidents to their enslaved chefs, who worked to establish a cultural foundation for the United States. Klein is also the co-author (with Catherine D’Ignazio) of Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020), a trade book that explores the intersection of feminist thinking and data science. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press), a hybrid print/digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge. The most recent book in this series is Debates in the Digital Humanities 2019.

Before arriving at Emory, Klein taught in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She also directed the Digital Humanities Lab there.

More information on her research and teaching can be found on her website: www.lklein.com.

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John Lindo interviewed by Dietrch Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

EDUCATION

• Provost's Postdoctoral Scholar, University of Chicago, 2015-2017
• PhD, University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, 2015
• MA, University of Pennsylvania, 2010

RESEARCH

• Ancient DNA
• Population Genetics
• Pathogen-Host Interactions
• Canine Social Evolution
• Human Adaptation to Changing Environments
• The Biological Effects of Colonization
• The Americas

My lab specializes in both the molecular and computational aspects of Ancient DNA research. By utilizing an integrative approach, including ancient whole genomes, statistical modeling, and functional methods, the lab examines genetic fluctuations that have occurred in different environments over time, thereby pointing to genetic traits that can inform more fine-grained hypotheses of adaptation. Current research is focused on identifying temporally-extended sets of molecular traits relevant to changes in human population density, changes in social stratification, the adoption of agriculture, local pathogens, high altitude adaptation, and environmental changes caused by European contact (e.g., disease, warfare, and social alterations). The lab is also focused on uncovering regional human population history in the Americas and linking individuals and communities to the multi-faceted ancient civilizations that existed before the colonial era.

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Ken Carter interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC

Dr. Ken Carter is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Psychology at Oxford College of Emory University, where he teaches introductory courses in psychology as well as advanced courses in clinical psychopharmacology, research methods, and personality.

Before joining the Oxford College faculty in 1994, Carter served as a senior assistant research scientist in the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s prestigious Epidemic Intelligence Service, with a research focus on smoking as a risk marker for suicidal behaviors in adolescents.

Carter has published extensively in both academic and lay publications, actively engaging in the translation of research in psychology into everyday language. His articles have been published in magazines such as mental_floss, and has appeared on news programs such as Connect With Kids and NBC’s Today show

He is the co-author of Learn Psychology (Jones and Bartlett), a textbook now in its second edition, and he is currently at work on an introductory psychology textbook for SAGE publications as well as a psychopathology textbook for Cambridge University Press. He is the designer and instructor of a course on the psychology of thrill-seeking now offered by Emory University and Coursera as a MOOC (massive online open course). Canadian museum Science North has launched an exhibit on sensation-seeking that was informed by Carter’s work that is currently traveling in North America. His most recent book is Buzz!: Inside the Minds of Thrill-Seekers, Daredevils, and Adrenaline Junkies (Cambridge University Press).

A graduate of Oxford College and Emory University, Carter received an MA and PhD in psychology from the University of Michigan. After completion of his doctoral work he also earned an MS in psychopharmacology from Fairleigh Dickinson University and gained board certification as a clinical psychologist.

You can find him on Twitter @drkencarter

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Arber Tasimi interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

BIO
Dr. Arber Tasimi received his B.A. in Psychology with Honors from the University of Pennsylvania in 2011 where he graduated summa cum laude. He then attended Yale University, earning his Ph.D. in 2017. Dr. Tasimi held a postdoctoral fellowship at Stanford University from 2017-2020 and joined the Department of Psychology at Emory University as an Assistant Professor in 2020.

RESEARCH
Dr. Tasimi is a developmental psychologist with broad interests in cognitive psychology, social psychology, behavioral economics, and affective science. His research aims to uncover the emergence of moral decision-making and to discover how and why people differ in their moral thinking of behavior. To approach these issues, his lab studies how moral decision-making unfolds over real time and developmental time. By illuminating how moral decision-making emerges as motivated behavior that reflects the interaction of developmental, cognitive, social, and affective processes, the ultimate promise of his research program is to inform practices––at the level of parents, teachers, and institutions––aimed at encouraging goodness and discouraging badness.

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Marcela Benitez interviewed by Dietrich Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

BIO
As a broadly trained primatologist, I am interested in the evolution of primate social cognition, the mechanisms that influence social choices, and under what context these decisions are adaptive. I received a joint Ph.D. in Biological Anthropology and Biopsychology from the University of Michigan in 2016 and recently completed an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University (GSU). My research program focuses on social cognition and the mechanisms driving social behavior in nonhuman primates. My current research examines how conflict influences cooperative decisions (i.e., parochial altruism) in capuchin monkeys, and the roles of testosterone and oxytocin in promoting cooperation during conflict. I am the co-director of a long-term field project, Capuchins de Taboga, examining the cognition and behavior of wild white-faced capuchins in the Guanacaste Region of Costa Rica. When not following monkeys through the forest, I work to increase visibility and opportunities for minority and queer students interested in Anthropology and STEM fields.

RESEARCH
My research program focuses on social cognition and the mechanisms driving social behavior in nonhuman primates. Specifically, I’m interested in how primates make important social decisions, what underlying factors impact these choices, and why these decisions are adaptive. I approach these questions from an evolutionary and comparative perspective while utilizing a mechanistic approach, through the integration of experimental paradigms in the wild, and the assessment and manipulation of hormones. My current research examines how conflict influences cooperative decisions (i.e., parochial altruism) in capuchin monkeys, and the roles of testosterone and oxytocin in promoting cooperation during conflict. My long-term objective is to examine the evolutionary roots and biological underpinnings of parochial altruism by comparing decision-making during conflict across the primate taxa in both captivity and in the wild.

I conduct this work on wild white-faced capuchins at my research station, Capuchinos de Taboga, in the Guanacaste region of Costa Rica, and with captive tufted capuchins at the Language Research Center at Georgia State University. Capuchins are an ideal model system for these questions as they are highly intelligent, social, and cooperative primates. In the lab, capuchins routinely work together to achieve a common goal, and in the wild capuchins regularly form coalitions to intimidate rivals. By combining wild and captive work, as well an integrating experimental paradigm in these monkey’s natural habitats, my work is uniquely suited to unpack both proximate and ultimate mechanisms of social decision-making in primates, offering a promising avenue for understanding the importance of sociality, cooperation, and conflict on primate cognitive evolution.

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Daniel Dilks (dilkslab) interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC

BIO
Daniel D. Dilks received his Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from Johns Hopkins University in 2005, after which he became a Postdoctoral Fellow, and later a Research Fellow, in the Kanwisher Laboratory at MIT. He joined the Emory faculty in September 2013. His research focuses on three big questions about human vision: i) How is the visual cortex functionally organized?, ii) How does this functional organization get wired up in development?, and iii) Once wired up, how does visual cortex change in adulthood? To address these questions, Dilks uses a variety of methods, including psychophysics and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in typical children, adults, and individuals with developmental disorders or brain damage, as well as transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) in typical adults - whatever it takes to answer the question.

AFFILIATIONS

• Faculty, Program in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology (NBB)
• Member, HERCULES Exposome Research Center, Emory University
• Investigator, Emory Eye Center, Emory Healthcare
• Member, Center for Visual & Neurocognitive Rehabilitation, Atlanta VA Medical Center

RESEARCH
INTERESTS - The functional organization of human visual cortex and its origins. Cortical plasticity in adult human vision.
AREAS - Face, place, and object processing, from infancy to adulthood. Reorganization of adult human primary visual cortex, and its perceptual consequences.

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Mel Konner interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC

EDUCATION

• PhD, Harvard University, 1973
• MD, Harvard Medical School, 1985
• A.B. , Anthropology, CUNY, Brooklyn College, 1966

BIO
Melvin (Mel) Konner came to Emory in 1983 as the first Chair of the newly-created Department of Anthropology. He co-founded the Anthropology & Human Biology major and has been a core member of the Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology faculty since that program was founded. He is also affiliated with the Tam Institute of Jewish Studies.

Long committed to fostering the public understanding of anthropology and evolution, he has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Review of Books, Newsweek, Salon.com, and many other publications both academic and general. He has testified twice at U.S. Senate hearings related to health care.

Konner is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2016. He is listed in Who’s Who in America, and received fellowships from the John Simon Guggheim Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, and others. He was a trustee of the Russell Sage Foundation (2000-2010) and received the John McGovern Award in Medical Humanities from the Yale School of Medicine. He was Creative Loafing’s Best Local Intellectual of 2004 and has been listed in “Who’s Who in Hell.”

RESEARCH
Specializations

• Hunting-gathering peoples

• Evolutionary anthropology

• Evolution of childhood

• Hunter-gatherer (“Paleolithic”) diets

• Human behavioral biology

• Medical anthropology

• Gender in evolutionary perspective

• Anthropology of the Jews

• Evolution of Religion

Konner did the first in-depth study of infancy among Kalahari hunter-gatherers when they were still living and raising children traditionally, probably partly reflecting conditions among our early modern human ancestors. In works such as The Evolution of Childhood (2010), Konner traces psychosocial development from birth to adulthood through neuroendocrine maturation and environmental influence, situating these complex processes in comparative, cross-cultural, and phylogenetic perspective.

Konner's years in the Kalahari also led him to help develop the "Paleolithic Diet" and to understand the health consequences of modern changes. His book The Tangled Wing was called by evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr "a beautifully written, well-balanced interpretation of human nature" and a "classic." Robert Sapolsky has called Konner "the nearest thing we have to a poet laureate of behavioral biology." The last of his eleven books, Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy, is an attempt at a 21st-century version of Ashley Montagu’s classic The Natural Superiority of Women, and argues that male supremacy as we know it is in evolutionary perspective temporary and destined to end soon. He is currently working on a book on the nature of faith.

www.melvinkonner.com.

www.jewsandothers.com

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An interdisciplinary discussion about the intersection of Theater and Linguistics, and specifically their approach to dialects.  The lunch will explore language, and its performance, through the lens of emotion, culture, and practice.     

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No sensory system is an island. The auditory and visual systems work together to provide information about the nature of the events occurring in the environment. I will talk about why they do this, where in the brain it happens, and how the brain performs the necessary computations to achieve it. I will emphasize the following general insights: 1. Interactions between sensory systems occur at the earliest possible point in the auditory pathway, namely, the eardrum. 2. The brain may employ a strategy akin to time-division multiplexing, in which neural activity fluctuates across time, to allow representations to represent more than one simultaneous stimulus. These findings speak to several general problems confronting modern neuroscience such as the hierarchical organization of brain pathways and limits on perceptual/cognitive processing.

Intro Music: Small Acts of Devotion feat. Ashkay-Naresh

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Media require active perception from their users. Videogames provide perhaps the most obvious example of this; in order to perceive the world of a videogame, a user must play the game, negotiating its spaces and manipulating its objects. While perception of cinema may be less obviously active, it is in fact no less active than is perception of games. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the emergence of film established new modes of experience for viewers, and perception of films remains a skill that cinema-goers continually develop and refine. Perception of media has often been treated as an exception to the operations of perception in general. Reflecting on the twin examples of the 2011 videogame The Unfinished Swan and the 1900 film How it Feels to be Run Over, I propose that active perception in media use might be seen as exemplary of, rather than exceptional to, the work we do every day in order to perceive the world around us.

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Tool making and use are often considered a hallmark of intelligence: the discovery that New Caledonian crows made tools caused a flurry of excitement in the world of animal cognition with much talk of 'feathered apes’.  Of the explanations for the rarity of tool making across the animal kingdom (e.g. brain size, group size, sociality), none appear satisfactory.  The rarity of the behaviour makes it difficult to study in an evolutionary context, but a phenotypically similar behaviour, nest building, is not at all rare. And it is increasingly amenable to investigation: I will present evidence of decision making with regard to appropriate materials and local environmental conditions, associating building decisions with reproductive success and the possibility of cultural evolution of built structures.

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To start with, the talk will review and update the hypothesis (How the Brain Got Language, Oxford University Press, 2012) that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed – but they were not language-using. The approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manual skills via biocultural evolution, while cultural evolution alone supported the emergence of language from protolanguage. The key innovation in this talk is the argument that this approach supports the view that the H. sapiens language-ready brain had the more general property of being construction-ready. This notion will be illustrated with data from monkey and human tool use and bird nest construction (introducing the word becculation, manipulation with a beak, into the English language) as well as data and speculations on symbols and symbolism in the protohistory of human architecture.

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Although using tools is a central feature of human biology, the lack of biologically-grounded theory in this domain limits our ability to study the phenomenon to relate it to human evolution. To begin to fill this gap, I present a theory of tooling applicable to individuals of all species. The theory draws on (a) ecological (perception–action) theory in psychology, that links an animal’s behavior to its perception of affordances, (b) psychological theories about how animals perceive space and move themselves in space, and (c) the biomechanical approach to the study of body movement and the development of coordination of movement.  Tooling theory supports testable hypotheses concerning a) the forms of tooling present in diverse taxa with varying perceptual and motor systems and bodies, b) the effects of specific environmental, individual, and task features on a specific performance, and c) the development of tooling. The determination that an action is or is not tooling has no bearing on a judgment about the intellect of the tooler. Instead, a classification of an action as tooling determines the analytical strategy one can take to examine the action. I apply the theory to wild bearded capuchin monkeys cracking nuts with stone hammers and anvils. 

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Jumping spiders (family Salticidae) have unique, complex eyes and a capacity for spatial vision exceeding that for any other animals of similar size. Most salticid species prey on insects but some species from a subfamily, Spartaeinae, are known to express an active preference for other spiders as prey (‘araneophagy’). We can gain important insights into animal cognition by exploring how these species use strategies for targeting this dangerous type of prey. For instance, studies using expectancy violation methods have shown that one of these spartaeine species, Portia africana, works with representations of different types of prey spiders. It also plans detours for reaching vantage points for capturing prey, and can decide ahead of time whether a detour is necessary. Moreover, new expectancy-violation experiments have shown that Portia africana represents the number of prey in a scene; P. africana becomes less inclined to complete a detour path if it encounters a different number of prey from what it had seen beforehand.

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Introduction by Laura Emmery, Emory University, Department of Music
Emory Music Department's McDowell Lecture Series with
Co-Sponsored by CMBC, The Hightower Fund, and the Program in Linguistics
presents:

Lawrence Zbikowski, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago
"Music and the Language of Emotions"
His research focuses on the application of recent work in cognitive science to a range of problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical grammar, the relationship between music and movement, text-music relations, and the structure of theories of music. He is the author of Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002) and Foundations of Musical Grammar (2017). He has recently contributed chapters to Music and Consciousness 2, Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse, The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition, Music in Time: Phenomenology, Perception, Performance, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. During 2010–11 he held a fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies and was also Fulbright Visiting Research Chair at McGill University.

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Contemporary psychology and neuroscience have shed little light on mental states associated with enhanced cognitive capacities. We report the existence of enhanced cognitive states, in which dramatic temporary enhancements in focused attention were observed in participants, engaged in high-arousal activities (playing action videogames, solving physical puzzle games in escape rooms, or performing Himalayan yoga visualization practices), whose skills matched the difficulty of the activity. Using EKG methodology, we showed that arousal, indicated by withdrawal from parasympathetic activity and activation of the sympathetic nervous system is a necessary physiological condition underlying these states. The EEG data demonstrated significant centro-parietal alpha and beta rhythm desynchronization, suggesting active mental states, in which participants are preparing for execution of a motor act or imagining such movement. The findings provide the first scientific evidence for the existence of unique mental states resulting from specific conditions, resonant with what has been described in previous phenomenological literature as “flow” or “peak experience”. The enhanced cognitive states are expected to be universal across domains that involve first-person focused attention activities (e.g., painting, dancing, chess playing, and extreme sport)

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MARIEKE VAN VUGT

Neuroscience, University of Groningen, NL

From Tibetan monks to dancers and back: trying to understand the role of inter-brain synchrony in human connection

While laboratory research can tell us many interesting things, there are many situations that are not captured by existing paradigms. In this talk, I will share my experience investigating the practice of monastic debate, a reasoning-based meditation practice that is a core component of life at Tibetan Buddhist monasteries. One of the notable features of this practice is that it is a dyadic practice, and for this reason we decided to investigate it using EEG hyperscanning. We observed increases in the synchrony between the brains of the two debaters when they were agreeing with each other compared to what they were disagreeing.

One of the interesting features of debate is that it is not only a challenging mental practice, but it also has a strong physical component. In some sense, it almost looks like a choreography. To disentangle whether the inter-brain synchrony was mainly driven by the mental processes or the movement, we decided to study dancers. The dancers we are working with are not only movement experts but also are able to generate a large spectrum of mental states that explore different facets of human connection. In a tour through the Netherlands, we have been collecting EEG data while the dancers are exploring human connectedness through movement. I will discuss challenges and opportunities involved in this method of data collection.

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LENA TING

Biomedical Engineering , Georgia Institute of Technology and Emory University

Neuromechanics of balance: from flamingos to dancers

Our ability to move in the world, and even to stand upright depend on complex and flexible neuromechanical interactions. Our experimental and computational studies of balance in one-, two-, and four-legged standing have revealed many ways that the brain and body interact and influence each other in the control of movement. I will demonstrate how the neural and mechanical computations used for balance are shaped by evolutionary, learning, and disease processes as well as behavioral context. Despite our individual differences in balance control, the same neuromechanical principles can be used to understand and model balance in health and disease.

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AUDREY DUARTE

Psychology, Georgia Institute of Technology

How measuring the sleeping brain at home can help us understand aging and Alzheimer’s disease

One of the most common and arguably most distressing cognitive declines in aging, in large part because it is also an early sign of Alzheimer’s disease, is in episodic memory. As people age, they report more everyday difficulties in, for example, remembering someone’s name or the location of a placed item. More serious memory failures include forgetting that one has already taken her medication that day. Although there is a general pattern of memory decline and related changes in underlying brain structure and function, there are substantial inter-individual differences in memory decline with some people aging better than others. It is of great importance to understand the factors, particularly malleable ones, that contribute to these individual differences. One such factor is sleep. Sleep stabilizes episodic memories, protecting them from decay, and sleep quality declines with age. We are exploring how a person’s sleep quality and related neural architecture contribute to memory functioning. Some aspects of sleep may serve as non-invasive biomarkers of Alzheimer’s disease, years before diagnosis. I will present results showing inter-individual variability in both neural activity and memory performance across age and discuss the role of sleep in mediating this variability across the adult lifespan. Our planned and future work will directly assess the impact of sleep interventions that might facilitate memory ability and stave off cognitive decline.

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KAREN ROMMELFANGER

Neurology, Emory University School of Medicine

Challenges in digital phenotyping: predicting brain health with phones, social media, and beyond

The landscape of healthcare is changing worldwide and in no small part due to the transformation to early detection and intervention and digital technologies in health. Digital phenotyping research and the insights that will be revealed for improving human health are unprecedented. Combined brain and behavior quantification could allow us to gain deeper insight than ever before of the basic mechanisms of human behavior and brain health. In this talk, we will explore the aspirations and value conflicts in research and future clinical implementation in brain health.

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KATHY TRANG

Anthropology, Emory University

Coloring perception: Neurocognitive predictors of real-time mental health vulnerability among highly traumatized men.

Attending to the everyday life-worlds of vulnerable populations has been a key manifest of biocultural anthropology. Ecological momentary assessments and neurocognitive methods play a critical role in illuminating not only the differential resources available to people, but also the differential ability with which they are able to perceive, prioritize, and utilize such resources. This paper aims to open a discussion of the potential values, limitations, and drawbacks of these technologies for advancing person-centered inquiry into human experience in limited-resource settings through specific examples from work among young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in Hanoi, Vietnam. Globally, trauma exposure is elevated among this population and may contribute towards their development of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). A debilitating psychiatric condition, PTSD is associated with a number of neurocognitive changes that affect decision-making, emotion-regulation, and social interaction. These changes may drive risk-taking behaviors and contribute to risk of treatment failure. Leveraging insights and methods from ethnographic, clinical, and digital health research, this study evaluated the relationship between YMSM’s neurocognitive performance and response to culturally and developmentally salient stressors in real-time. This presentation presents preliminary results from the study and reflects on the potentials and constraints operant in design and implementation of such research in low-resource settings.

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SUZANNE DIKKER

Neuroscience, Utrech University, NL and New York University

Brains in harmony: Connecting art, neuroscience and education outside of the laboratory.

Neuroscience research has produced tremendous insight into how the human brain supports dynamic social interactions. Still, laboratory-generated findings do not always straightforwardly generalize to real-world environments. To fill this gap, I collaborate with scientists, artists, and educators to take neuroscience out of the laboratory, into schools, museums, and underserved neighborhoods. In one series of studies, we partnered with New York City high schools to collect brain data during class. We find that brain-to-brain synchrony among students predicts classroom social dynamics and student engagement, two factors that have been found critical for student learning. In another project, we recorded brain data from thousands of museum visitors as they engaged in face-to-face interactions and find that empathy, social closeness and mood predict brain-to-brain synchrony. More recently, we have begun investigating the neural dynamics underlying adult-child interactions, specifically in bilingual households and children with Autism Spectrum Disorder. Taken together, our multidisciplinary approach may provide a potential new avenue to investigate social interactions outside of the laboratory.

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The notion that cognition comprises more than computations of a central nervous system operating on representations has gained a foothold in human cognitive science for a few decades now. Various brands of embodied, extended, and enactive cognition, some more conservative and some more liberal, have paraded in philosophy and cognitive science. I call the genus including all such species situated cognition, and go on to depict selected cases in non-human comparative cognition. The octopus displays embodied cognition, with some of the computational work offloaded to the periphery. Web-building spiders showcase extended cognition, in which objects external to the animal—the web in the case of spiders—play a crucial causal role in cognition. A criterion of mutual manipulability, in which causal influence flows both ways between organism and extended object, serves to delimit the scope of extended cognition. Play in dogs features intelligence on-the-run, arising out of action, a key characteristic of enactive cognition. I discuss other cases in which action entwines with central representational cognition to achieve goal-directed behavior. Considering situated cognition in diverse animals leads to myriad research questions that can enrich the study of cognition.

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The "Embodiment of Thinking" a musical interlude/lesson sung by Dr. Ken Cheng.

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Robert Hampton introduces Ken Cheng:

Ants as a group feature especially small brains even for their small size, and yet many species are expert navigators forging learned routes about their habitat. Working to bring food to their next, they make excellent research animals for navigational research because they do not satiate when given food repeatedly. I review briefly ants' navigational tool kit, with part integration, view-based navigation (and to some extent cues of other modalities), and systematic search being chief components. Then I describe some evidence on two major themes. First, ants integrate cues from multiple navigational systems that are processed in parallel. In some cases, they even integrate in an optimal (Bayesian) fashion. Second, how ants learn to use views for navigation and how they modify view-based navigation on the basis of experience (learning) has recently been investigated. I highlight some recent work on this experimental ethology of learning to navigate.

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All biological sounds originate with body movements. However, theories of speech production and perception have not generally been grounded in models of how bodies move. In this talk, I will argue that the body has been a crucial missing link in theories of speech, and will show how a deeper – and less culturally biased – understanding of the body’s role in speech, gained partly through advances in biomechanical simulation, can help us to make sense of how sounds are produced for communication. I will show how this framework sheds light on such wide-ranging issues as: why languages universally use similar movement inventories, how movement variation becomes speech variation and sound change, links between speech and non-speech functions such as digestion, respiration and emotion expression, whether spoken and signed language follow similar principles, the role of sensory feedback in speech, and how innate infant behaviors bootstrap speech.

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High Church evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts. In making the case for cognitive gadgets, I’ll suggest that experimental evidence from computational cognitive science is an important and neglected resource for research on cultural evolution.

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A striking feature of the real world is that there is too much to think about. This feature is remarkably understudied in laboratory contexts, where the study of decision-making is typically limited to small “choice sets” defined by an experimenter. In such cases an individual may devote considerable attention to each item in the choice set. But in everyday life we are often not presented with defined choice sets; rather, we must construct a viable set of alternatives to consider. I will present several recent and ongoing research projects that each aim to understand how humans spontaneously decide what actions to consider—in other words, how we construct choice sets. A common theme among these studies is a key role for cached value representations. Additionally, I will present some evidence that moral norms play a surprisingly and uniquely large role in constraining choice sets and, more broadly, in modal cognition. This suggests a new avenue for understanding the specific manner in which morality influences human behavior.

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I outline a computational theory of phenomenal conscious experience, that is, of the basic awareness and its obligatory attendant feelings, involving neither the awareness of awareness nor a sense of self. This Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET) identifies phenomenality with certain intrinsic properties of the dynamics of the system in question. More specifically, it aims to explain the structure, the quantity, and the quality of phenomenal experience in terms of trajectories through the space of the system's emergent metastable macrostates and their intrinsic (that is, observer-independent) topology and geometry. Joint work with Roy Moyal and Tomer Fekete.

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What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an approximation to such a grammar, for any language, has been formulated; the idea that grammar is universal and innately specified has proved barren; and attempts to show how it could be learned from experience invariably come up short. To move on from this impasse, we must rediscover the extent to which language is like any other human behavior: dynamic, social, multimodal, patterned, and purposive, its purpose being to promote desirable actions (or thoughts) in others and self. Recent psychological, computational, neurobiological, and evolutionary insights into the shaping and structure of behavior may then point us toward a new, viable account of language.

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What are the components of musical ability, and to what extent are they shared with spoken language processing? Both music and language are composed of sounds combined into complex sequences. Both also exhibit tonality, pitch, and rhythmic grouping and convey emotional meaning. Drs. Laura Emmery (Department of Music) and Christina Tzeng (Department of Psychology) will explore the intersections between these two phenomena. Dr Emmery will address some of the mental processes that underlie music behaviors—how emotion, environment, individual preferences, and other factors influence how we perceive music. Dr. Tzeng will share insights into the extent to which the cognitive and perceptual abilities that enable human language might also be shared with music. Drawing from music theory and psychology, we will discuss the functional significance of music and language in the human experience.

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How your digital footprint can improve your life, advance science, and harm you

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To make sense of sound, there is a wide activation of sensorimotor, cognitive, and reward circuitry in the brain. Active and repeated engagement with sounds that activate all these circuits, therefore, is a route to honing our brain function. Playing music is like hitting the jackpot for the brain because it requires the motor system, deeply engages our emotions, and absolutely gives us a cognitive workout. We have employed a biological approach, the frequency-following response (FFR), to reveal the integrity of sound processing in the brain and how these brain processes are shaped by music training. We have found that music works in synergistic partnerships with language skills and the ability to make sense of speech in noisy, everyday listening environments. We have found that music brings about a “speeding” of auditory system development, and a tendency toward a reversal of the biological impact of poverty-induced linguistic deprivation. The generalization from music to everyday communication illustrates both that these auditory brain mechanisms have a profound potential for plasticity and that sound processing is biologically intertwined with listening and language skills. In much the same way as music benefits sound processing in the brain, concussion brings about sound processing dysfunction, pointing to a role for auditory function assessment in the management of concussion. Together, these findings also have the potential to inform health care, education, and social policy by lending a neurobiological perspective to music education and the management of concussion.

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Cultural traits—behaviors that are learned from others—can change more rapidly than genes and can be inherited not only from parents but also from teachers and peers. How does this complex process of cultural evolution differ from and interact with genetic evolution? In this talk, I will discuss the dynamics of culturally transmitted behaviors on dramatically different evolutionary timescales: the learned songs of a family of songbirds and the spoken languages of modern human populations. Both of these behaviors enable communication between individuals and facilitate complex social interactions that can affect genetic evolution. My analyses of these two systems demonstrate that learned behaviors, while less conserved than genetic traits, can retain evolutionary information across great distances and over long timescales.

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Which Way to the Dawn of Speech? (click for link to PowerPoint)
Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech science
Louis-Jean Boë & Thomas R. Sawallis

1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France
2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USA

In the weeks around New Years, 2017, two complementary articles discussing speech evolution appeared in respected general science journals: Fitch et al., 2016, in Science Advances and Boë et al., 2017, in PLOSOne. These two articles announced the final failure of a theory that had been widely propagated and broadly accepted for half a century, despite numerous critiques and partial falsifications: the laryngeal descent theory (LDT) of Lieberman and colleagues (Lieberman, 1968; Lieberman et al., 1969; Lieberman & Crelin, 1971). Taken together, those studies represented – and continue to represent – an extremely powerful research paradigm, drawn directly from the core understanding of speech science, that the acoustic speech signal transmits articulatory information. Specifically the authors: (i) used recorded calls of live primates to make anatomical inferences about vocal tracts (VTs), (ii) used either VT casts of extant primates or reconstructions of fossil species’ VTs to make acoustic inferences, and (iii) by appropriate comparisons of anatomy and acoustics, drew conclusions regarding both the ontogeny and the phylogeny of speech.
Their conclusions, later termed LDT, were: that fully human speech, in particular the full human vowel inventory, was made possible by the large pharyngeal cavity resulting from laryngeal descent, which occurs over the lifespan of anatomically modern Homo sapiens (AMHS) only; that living primates, pre-modern humans (including Neanderthals), and modern human toddlers were restricted to schwa-like vowels; and that speech could only have developed after the emergence of AMHS some 200,000 years ago, and language more recently still.
Controversy in speech evolution research is inevitable, due to lack of fossil evidence, difficulty of experimental design and data collection, absence of general paradigms, and especially, the need for multidisciplinary cooperation among otherwise compartmentalized fields. We will give some taste of that controversy as we trace 3 decades of difficult work showing that a large pharynx from laryngeal descent is not necessary to produce the full inventory of vowels. Theoretical arguments claimed that infants, Neanderthals, and primates were anatomically able to produce contrasting vowels, and recorded evidence accumulated that infants could as well, and finally, the articles noted above presented MRIs of macaque VTs and especially recorded calls from baboons showing both produce contrasting vowels, all without the large pharynx required by LDT. If we think of this evidence as in some sense “fossils” of early speech emergence, this pushes the “dawn of speech” 100 times further back in our history, to our last common ancestor with old world monkeys, over 20 million years ago.
We will present new evidence we have recently developed further reinforcing that claim, and will outline certain implications for language evolution theory & research more generally.

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Barbara Ternes was one of several personal assistants to Margaret Mead. Barbara Ternes served as Dr. Mead’s “gatekeeper” during the early 70’s, scheduling and travelling extensively with Dr. Mead. Barbara Ternes was married to the late, Alan Ternes, former Editor Emeritus of the Natural History Magazine and editor of the 1975 publication, Ants, Indidans, and Little Dinosaurs.

The Ternes lived in NYC and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. During Dr. Mead’s last days, she lived with Barbara Ternes, at the DeMenille estate on Long Island.

Currently, Ms. Ternes lives in Bellows Falls, VT, spends time with her adult children in NYC and frequented Atlanta, GA, spending time with Emory graduate (50C) and friend, the late Father Austin Ford, founder of Emmaus House, an Episcopal outreach in the Peoplestown community of Atlanta. http://www.emoryhistory.emory.edu/facts-figures/people/makers-history/profiles/ford.html

(https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/fall95/austinford.html)

Ms. Ternes stopped in for a CMBC Lunch to relay some personal stories from her days working with Dr. Mead.

A YouTube version can be accessed here: https://youtu.be/E5geVXHsDWQ?t=1

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VIDEO

Although great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and human children suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevant mechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food to special forms of social evaluation. The Shared Intentionality hypothesis specifies the ontogeny of these underlying mechanisms and their consequences for both human cognition and human social life.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC).

Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU

Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentations will include an exploration of 1) what the current state of our knowledge is with respect to cognitive development, 2) how investigations of human development can expand to non-WEIRD samples, particularly small-scale societies, 3) what methodologies have been or should be developed to promote effective cross-cultural research, and 4) what are the primary theoretical and empirical obstacles to the study of cognitive development in diverse populations.

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Perspectives from dance professionals and professors (Teague and Abarca) on the issue of self-consciousness and the quest for authenticity will be discussed in light of developmental research on the origins of self-concept (Rochat). A developmental blueprint of self-awareness will be presented (Rochat), alongside somatic approaches to dance training, grounding the discussion in what might be the foundations of what we perceive as authentic movement in the context of daily social interactions (Rochat) and in dance performances (Teague and Abarca). The concept of “presence” as opposed to “absence” will be tentatively discussed as a potential subjective benchmark of what we perceive as authentic: something that is direct and devoid of self-consciousness, producing “a flow,” “ a fullness,” “a groundedness” from within.

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The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood tells the story of the Baltimore-based Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a probability sample of typical urban children who came of age over the last decades of the 20th Century and into the first decade of the 21st. It is an account of their social mobility from origins to destinations, framed in life-course perspective. Two characteristic mobility paths are documented, both grounded in family resources: 1) status attainment through school serves mainly to preserve middle class privilege across generations; 2) status attainment in the non-college workforce privileges lower SES whites over African Americans of like background, white men most immediately through access to high wage employment in the remnants of Baltimore’s old industrial economy and then, derivatively, to the lower SES white women who marry and partner with them.

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Taking the Lead on Motivation

Proponents of Predictive Processing (PP) describe it as a grand unifying theory of the mind (Hohwy 2014, Clark 2015). However, the relationship between PP and its closest rival, reinforcement learning (RL), is controversial. Unificationists about PP sometimes argue that active inference can account for core features of RL (Friston et al. 2009). Anti-unificationists reject this and defend explanatory pluralism as the most promising avenue for scientific progress (Colombo and Wright 2016). I argue for an intermediate position: even if RL is a special case of Bayes-optimal inference, it remains better suited to explaining motivation – and failures of motivation – than its more abstract counterpart (Dayan and Abbott 2001, Trappenberg 2002, Woodward 2014, Klein 2016).

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Professor Tecumseh Fitch

Dept of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria

I investigate human language viewed as a species-typical aspect of our biology, and attempt to understand it via comparison with other species’ cognition and communication systems (the comparative approach). The first step in doing so is to break language down to its components (the multi-component approach) and then ask which components are shared with which other species (or not). I present evidence for continuity in speech perception, most aspects of speech production, and of human conceptual semantics with animal cognition, and evidence for discontinuity when it comes to organizing principles of syntax (hierarchical structure) and potentially some aspects of semantics (pragmatic, theory-of-mind based production). I conclude that comparative research, guided by specific computational and mechanistic models deriving from linguistics and cognitive science, must play a central role in future attempts to understand language evolution.

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Neuroscience has advanced considerably in the 40 years after Nagel’s classic essay, posing the question of “what it’s like to be a bat.” Drawing on recent results in which dogs are trained for awake fMRI studies, Profs. Berns and Risjord will discuss and debate whether we are at the point where neuroscience can provide meaningful insights into the subjective experiences of other animals.

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Dr. Mesa-Castillo has been conducting research on schizophrenia for more than 33 years in Cuba, the United States, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, and Ethiopia. He will provide an overview of his research, which provided the first direct evidence of virus infection in the central nervous system in schizophrenia [Journal of Microbiology Review, 1995] and also advanced the application of electro-microscopy to the study of serious mental illness. Dr. Mesa-Castillo's presentation will address the role of infection and fetal programming in mental illness, as well as the importance of disease prevention through investigation of the prenatal stage of development. Dr. Mesa-Castillo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an International Award from the U.S. Stanley Foundation and a Distinguished Investigator Award from NARSAD.

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Scientists have identified a series of milestones in the evolution of the human food quest that they anticipate had far-reaching impacts on biological, behavioral and cultural evolution: the inclusion of substantial portions of meat, the broad-spectrum revolution and the transition to food production. The foraging shift to dense and predictable resources is another key milestone that had consequential impacts on the later part of human evolution. The theory of economic defendability predicts that this shift had an important consequence: elevated levels of intergroup territoriality and conflict. In this talk, I integrate this theory with a well-established general theory of hunter-gatherer adaptations and make predictions for the sequence of appearance of several evolved traits of modern humans. I review the distribution of dense and predictable resources in Africa and argue that they occur only in aquatic contexts (coasts, rivers and lakes). The paleoanthropological empirical record contains recurrent evidence for a shift to the exploitation of dense and predictable resources by 110,000 years ago, and the first known occurrence is in a marine coastal context in South Africa. Some theory predicts that this elevated conflict would have provided the conditions for selection for the hyperprosocial behaviors unique to modern humans.

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A fundamental and frequently overlooked aspect of animal learning is its reliance on compatibility between the learning rules used and the attentional and motivational mechanisms directing them to process the relevant data (called here data-acquisition mechanisms). We propose that this coordinated action, which may first appear fragile and error prone, is in fact extremely powerful, and critical for understanding cognitive evolution. Using basic examples from imprinting and associative learning, we argue that by coevolving to handle the natural distribution of data in the animal's environment, learning and data-acquisition mechanisms are tuned jointly so as to facilitate effective learning using relatively little memory and computation. We then suggest that this coevolutionary process offers a feasible path for the incremental evolution of complex cognitive systems, because it can greatly simplify learning. This is illustrated by considering how animals and humans can use these simple mechanisms to learn complex patterns and represent them in the brain.

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Our ability to teach and learn from each other is a foundational aspect of human nature. It has underpinned the remarkable evolutionary success of our species and remains critical to the fortunes and prospects of modern societies. This CMBC Symposium brings together perspectives from ethnography, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and the sociology of education for a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation of what we have learned about the many ways in which we learn. Panelists: Susan Gelman (Department of Psychology, University of Michigan), Jason Yeatman (Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington), Cassidy Puckett (Department of Sociology, Emory University), and Barry Hewlett (Department of Anthropology, Washington State University)

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One of the most challenging aspects of learning is theory-change -- abandoning an old explanatory framework for a new one.  When is theory change possible, and when do intuitive theories persist alongside those that are taught in school? How do children's intuitive theories distort the lessons from school?  And what are the (implicit) mechanisms that work to foster or suppress children's intuitive theories? I examine these questions by focusing on two conceptual biases (essentialism and teleology) within different cultural contexts.

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A central and consequential feature of technological competence in the digital age is the ability to learn new technologies as they emerge--what I call "digital adaptability." Macro-level research suggests differences in digital adaptability are related to various forms of inequality. However, research has not yet been able to link macro-level trends to micro-level processes, made difficult without a direct measure of adaptability. My research addresses this gap by defining and measuring adolescents' digital adaptability and connecting it to educational inequality in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). In this presentation, I describe a study in Chicago and a replication study in Boston involving a total of ~2,600 students in which I validated a measure of digital adaptability and found a link between adaptability and adolescents' current STEM participation, educational plans, and career aspirations--all prerequisites for future completion of college degrees in STEM fields, with important implications for parents, educators, and policy makers.

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The brain did not evolve specialized circuits for reading. Rather, the process of learning to read induces changes in the underlying structure and function of the brain that support this fundamental academic skill. In other words, education scaffolds the development of the brain's reading circuitry. In this talk, I will first outline the neurobiological underpinnings of literacy and give an overview of how the brain converts symbols on a page to sound and meaning. Then I will present new data showing how reading instruction induces changes in the brain that track the learning process. These data reveal that the anatomical structure of the brain is surprisingly plastic, and that networks of anatomical connections flexibly adapt to meet the demands of a child's learning environment.

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This talk examines evolutionary, developmental psychology and social-cultural anthropology debates regarding how children learn from others. Cognitive psychologists and evolutionary biologists indicate that teaching, accurate imitation, and language are distinct features of human cognition that enable high fidelity transmission of cultural variants and cumulative culture. The talk examines whether or not one type of teaching, called natural pedagogy, and one type of accurate imitation, called overimiation, exist among Aka hunter-gatherers of the Congo Basin. These and other studies of teaching and learning in hunter-gatherers are presented and situated in the culturally constructed niches of intimate living and foundation schemas of equality, autonomy, and sharing.

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This collaborative discussion focuses on the complex question: How and why do parents interact differently with sons and daughters? We approach these questions with the assumption that gender differences in parenting are expressed and performed in everyday interactions between parents and children and shape how children come to understand what it means to be "male" or "female" in their culture. Dr. Fivush will share insights from her research on the social construction of gender in family narratives; Dr. Mascaro will discuss recent findings on gender differences in paternal behavior and brain responses to children. We will also discuss how the social construction of gender is influenced by biology, and we will discuss the evidence that these gender differences in parenting help children construct notions of gender and influence children's social and emotional development. (October 19, 2017)

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Recent attempts to use findings in neuroscience to inform our understanding of religious experience have focused on explaining the origins of religious activity and belief as potential byproducts of neural structures that evolved for, and were exapted from, other biological functions. Brain mechanisms implicated in attributing agency, detecting intentions, social reward, pro-social adaptation, and other aspects of social cognition have variously been proposed as potential pathways leading to the emergence of commonalities in religion and ritual across cultures. Conversely, conditions where those mechanisms are perturbed or impaired are potentially useful in testing new theories in neurotheology. Most proposals in this area have neglected the role of development and early experience in shaping neural function throughout the lifespan. This presentation will provide an overview of recent research in developmental social neuroscience, in the context of autism, in order to explore the extent to which social cognition in general and neurodevelopmental disorders in particular may or may not be able to shed light on religiosity. This talk was presented as part of the CMBC 2017 Summer Workshop.

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Are non-clinical populations high on the autistic spectrum less likely to "get" religion? Building on the first talk, I ask whether autism increases the odds of disbelief, as has been predicted by some cognitive theories of religious belief. Probing further, I ask whether this link is statistically explained by the selective deficits in theory of mind associated with the autistic spectrum. Next I explore whether gender differences in autism and theory of mind offer a novel, if partial, explanation for the well-documented gender gap in religious belief. Further, I present new research on links between the schizotypal spectrum in non-clinical populations – a cluster of traits partly characterized by a hyperactive theory of mind – and hyper-religiosity. This link in turn may offer insights into the psychological profile of the "spiritual but not religious" phenomenon.

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For a given person to believe in a deity or deities, she must (a) be able to form intuitive mental representations of supernatural agents; (b) be motivated to commit to supernatural agents (and related rituals) as real and relevant sources of meaning and control; and (c) have received specific cultural inputs that, of all the supernatural agents or forces one could possibly think of, one or more specific deities should be believed in and committed to. In this talk, I present these interrelated hypotheses from the new cognitive science of religion and the science of cultural evolution in light of the growing evidence from diverse fields. I also present new research about belief in karma in relation to cognitive theories. Throughout the talk I explore the current controversies and debates about the social cognitive and cultural learning capacities that make human beings a believing species. This talk was presented as part of the 2017 CMBC Summer Workshop.

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The cognitive science of religion (CSR) illuminates similar features of experience that arise in religious settings and that are associated with some mental disorders. We endorse explanatory pluralism, the view that cross-scientific investigations are enriched by integrating theory, methods, and evidence from multiple analytical levels, and ecumenical naturalism, which holds that: (1) examining features of experiences in different mental disorders and similar features of religious experiences will offer insights about underlying mental systems that figure in both, (2) CSR’s by-product theory maintains that religious experiences rely on cultural triggers of maturationally natural mental systems that underpin various ordinary experiences, and (3) CSR’s methods, theories, and findings will provide leverage for explaining many similar features of mental disorders. Schizophrenics and some Christians not only hear voices but attribute those experiences to agents other than themselves. An examination of experiencing voices in schizophrenia and experiencing God’s voice suggests that they rely on the same mental systems and cognitive dispositions. Whether in mental disorders or in religions, these include: experiencing a person’s own self-conception in narrative terms (automatic) linguistic processing (automatic) attributions of agency and mind (intrinsic or extrinsic disruptions in) source monitoring *filling-in agents (whether via culturally available resources or not)

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The negative academic and health effects of ethnic/racial discrimination are robust and pervasive. Taking a biopsychosocial approach, the current study combines actigraphy with a daily diary design to explore sleep duration and quality as an explanatory link between discrimination and outcomes. In a sample of 189 ethnic/racially diverse 9th grade adolescents, the study first assessed the daily impact of discrimination on next-day academic engagement and mood. Second, the study explored sleep as a mediating pathway between discrimination and outcomes. This paper contributes to two timely, yet independent, developmental science literatures. First, the study contributes to a growing literature on how social experiences of discrimination may be embodied psychophysiologically to contribute to ethnic/racial academic and health disparities. Second, the study contributes to the burgeoning science of sleep and its importance for youth development. Intersecting these literatures, the study found that on days in which youths reported unfair ethnic/racial treatment, they also spent more minutes awake after falling asleep. In turn, sleep disturbance was associated with feeling more anxious and less academically engaged the next day. Together, the data support a temporal mediated pathway wherein discrimination is associated with same-evening sleep disturbance, which is then predictive of next-day outcomes. The developmental implications of the observed daily-level associations are profound. Over time, the downstream effects of everyday discrimination may contribute to persistent academic and health disparities.

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As a psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and anthropologist, I will review and discuss the discourse on laughter. Traditionally, this discourse seems to summon to mind three principal characteristics of laughter: its specifically human nature, its structural relationship to the joy and pleasure procured by what is laughable, making laughter an indicator of “good health,” and its automatic, reflexive aspect. Unfortunately, it seems to obscure two fundamental aspects of laughter: its historicity and the complexity of its determinism. I think that laughter, like all human behavior, referring to human complexity, must be the object of a multi and interdisciplinary approach involving biological, psychological, historical and socio-cultural considerations. And one of the modes of their interaction may be supplied by the idea of communication. Indeed, traditionally perceived as being a facial emotional expression, laughter is fundamentally a mode of non-verbal communication of different types of affective messages among which figure, in the first place, joy and pleasure, but also aggressiveness and anxiety. So this idea of communication could well be the unifying concept by means of which laughter’s biological, psychological, pathological and socio-cultural facets may be envisaged.

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Language Documentation is a reborn, refashioned, and reenergized subfield of linguistics motivated by the urgent task of creating a record of the world’s fast disappearing languages. In addition to producing resources for communities interested in language and culture preservation, maintenance, and revitalization, language documentation continues to produce data that challenge and improve linguistic theory. A case in point is a pattern of participant marking, i.e. ways that speakers indicate who does what to whom in a sentence, in the endangered languages of the Tibeto-Burman region (Northeast India). From current typological studies we expect one of three participant marking patterns and these are based on purely syntactic factors. From very small languages in and around the Himalayan region we discover that that there is a possible fourth pattern based not on syntax but on information structure and pragmatics – a game changing discovery for syntactic and typological theory. Endangered language data also provides data on how humans represent and interact with their environment and through this data provide a window into human cognition. Looking again at Tibeto-Burman, we find languages with complex systems of directional marking which, in the simplest sense, indicate the direction in which an activity is or will be performed. However, directionals are metaphorically extended to express movement through time and social or psychological space. Appropriate usage requires knowledge of social conventions and the cultural attribution of relative prestige of locations. Such data requires us to revisit theories of spatial cognition.

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This talk discusses the wide-ranging potential of immersive virtual reality (IVR) as a research tool in the behavioral sciences. The speaker will discuss her research using IVR to study mundane judgments of the built environment, her emergency evacuation IVR work conducted with engineers and disaster experts, and her social-health work studying HIV risk behavior in highly interactive dating scenarios with virtual dating partners.

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Why do today's religions look and function the way they do? Presenting research primarily on religion’s effects on prosocial behavior and prejudice toward outgroups, I will argue that the form and function of modern religions can be understood as the legacy of a millennia-long process of cultural evolution. Our recent research has begun to empirically test perennially debated questions about whether religions make people act more ethically, what functions religions have served, and why some religious traditions have fared better than others. The results reveal that while the social consequences of religion are not always desirable, they can be explained as the product of cultural adaptations that served vital social functions. In particular, I’ll discuss how recurrent elements throughout religions have served to stabilize cooperation among large groups of unrelated strangers, and maximize survival in intergroup competition. Finally, I’ll speak about how this cultural evolutionary perspective informs predictions about the future of religion. Altogether, this research demonstrates how social psychological research can add important empirical data to heated debates about the values and vices of religion in the modern world.

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A chief stumbling block for a science of consciousness has always been that there are so few ways to measure consciousness. Recent developments in clinical neuroscience suggest a promising new start on this problem, and raise new empirical issues. The progress may also carry some surprising philosophical implications for realists about consciousness.

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Scientists have made substantial progress in understanding the evolution of mammalian sleep, yet the evolution of human sleep has been largely ignored in comparative studies. This omission is surprising given the extraordinary mental capacity and behavioral flexibility of humans, and the importance of sleep for human cognitive performance. I will discuss new phylogenetic methods that enable rigorous investigation of sleep along a single evolutionary lineage, and will apply these methods to study human sleep and brain size. In addition, I will present new findings from my lab on sleep in traditional human populations, which sheds additional light on the evolution of human sleep. I will close by considering how evolutionary perspectives provide insights to human sleep disorders, health across the lifespan, and health disparities.

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Alena Esposito and Donald Tuten discuss different aspects of research on bilingualism. Dr. Esposito focuses on recent cognitive and neuroscientific research on bilingualism, while Dr. Tuten focuses on fundamental questions in social and cultural approaches to research on bilingualism. Both presenters touch on and consider the implications of these approaches on education and educational approaches to research on bilingualism.

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In June 2016, a small group of world-leading neuroscientists, ethicists, social scientists and clinical researchers came together with two goals: to initiate a global research consortium in neuroscience ethics; and to come up with a research agenda for that consortium. Were the goals met? Yes and no. In this talk I identify some of the key clashes, the strange alliances, and the isolation tactics that collectively enabled the consortium to establish an identity and a mission, at a cost. I will draw on some recent theories of disciplinarity to understand what happened in the meeting; but I will also suggest that a key problematic, that between ‘ethics’ and ‘values,’ has not been taken sufficiently seriously by those who endeavour to construct multi- and inter-disciplinary research initiatives in neuroscience ethics.

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In my lab, we recently discovered a new type of cognitive bias brought on by the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state for a currently inaccessible word. When in a TOT state, participants think it more likely that a currently unretrievable word was presented in a darker, clearer font upon last seeing it, a larger font upon last seeing it, that it is of higher frequency in the language, and that it starts with a more common first letter in the language. This pattern suggests that TOT states bias people to infer that the unretrieved target information has qualities that tend to characterize fluency or accessibility, even when that is not the case. In further studies, we have found that the TOT’s biasing effects also extend to the immediately surrounding circumstances during the TOT as well. For example, people judge celebrity faces as belonging to more ethical people when in a TOT state for the name than when not, and rate their inclination to take an unrelated gamble as being higher when in a TOT state than when not. Other findings from our lab suggest that TOT states bias people toward inferring positive qualities of the unretrieved information: When in TOT states, people infer a greater likelihood that the target is a positively-valenced word, and that it was associated with a higher value on an earlier study list. Taken together, results suggest that TOT states may involve a “warm glow” that extends to any decisions that are made during the state. Finally, this type of metacognitive bias is not limited to TOT states. Recent work from our lab suggests that déjà vu states can also be biasing. Participants report a greater feeling of knowing what will happen next as an event unfolds when in a déjà vu state than when not, even though no such predictive ability is exhibited. This déjà vu bias may explain the often-reported link between reported déjà vu states and feelings of knowing what will happen next.

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Recent NSF Program Directors Laura Namy and Victoria Powers discuss current funding opportunities from the National Science Foundation and secrets to a successful application.

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Why does race serve as the most polarizing feature of American politics? Presumably, Americans have a stake in proclaiming America’s greatness, particularly touting pride in democratic governance, protecting civil rights and liberties, and making progress in areas that serve as ugly scars in its history. Yet research suggests the effects of racial bias now surpass the typical partisan and ideological predispositions that drive political decision making and judgments. This phenomenon is highlighted by public opinion data collected over the past 10 years covering Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and subsequent administrations. As the prototypically racially neutral African American politician, Barack Obama was expected to inhibit the activation of negative racial appraisals and threat. Contrary to such expectations, a number of studies show this did not happen, as perceptions of Obama and his policies are linked strongly to negative racial attitudes. But negative racial attitudes are not limited to Obama; they also continue to have significant effects on ostensibly non-racial issues like voting rights and even the purity of the election process itself. Most surprisingly, some of the strongest effects of racial attitudes are found among Democrats and liberals. Essentially, Obama’s ascendancy created a space for political discourse about the relevance of, and resentment toward, race in nearly every aspect of American politics. As a result, explicit and implicit racial information cues promote ideas and emotions that make racialization both easy and effective. Summarily, scholars, and the public alike, are left with questions about the permanency of racial thinking (and racism) in America.

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What personality traits make for successful politicians? What contributes to political partisanship? In this heated election season, come join Dr. Alan Abramowitz (Political Science) and Dr. Scott Lilienfeld (Psychology) for a conversation about the factors influencing presidential elections from the standpoint of both voters and candidates. Dr. Abramowitz will discuss the growing political partisanship of the American electorate, and its potential sociological and political sources. Dr. Lilienfeld will discuss psychohistorical research on how personality variables (e.g., narcissism, extraversion, antagonism) among U.S. Presidents (and other leaders) predict their success and failure, as well as how such variables might shape voter choices.

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Humans routinely confront situations that require coordination between individuals, from mundane activities such as planning where to go for dinner to incredibly complicated activities, such as multi-national agreements. How did this ability arise, and what prevents success in those situations in which it breaks down? To understand how this capability evolved across the primates, my lab uses the methodology of experimental economics. This is an ideal mechanism for the comparative approach as it is a well-developed methodology for distilling complex decision-making in to a series of simple choices, allowing these decisions to be compared across species and contexts using identical methodologies. We have investigated coordination in New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and great apes, including both chimpanzees and humans. We find that there are remarkable continuities of outcome across the primates, including humans, however there are also important differences in how each species reaches these outcomes. For example, while humans and other primates can find the same coordinated outcome, our research indicates that they are using different cognitive mechanisms to do so. Additionally, in many primates, including humans, cooperation breaks down under conditions of inequity. However, only humans and chimpanzees seem to be able to rectify inequity, presumably avoiding this breakdown and thereby maintaining a successful cooperative partnership. This ability is undoubtedly the foundation of the much more complex sense of fairness that evolved uniquely in humans. By carefully considering both the similarities and differences among species, we can better understand how cooperative decision-making emerged in the primates, and how each species relates to the others.

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Music is ancient and universal in human cultures. In The Descent of Man, Darwin theorized that musical rhythmic processing tapped into ancient and widespread aspects of animal brain function. While appealing, this idea is being challenged by modern cross-species and neurobiological research. In this talk I will describe research supporting the hypothesis that musical beat processing has its origin in another rare biological trait shared by humans and just a few other groups of animals (none of which are primates), namely complex vocal learning. I will also suggest that once the capacity for beat processing arose in our species, it was refined and enhanced by mechanisms of gene-culture coevolution due to the impact of synchronization to a beat on social bonds in early human groups. (March 22, 2016) Sponsored by the CMBC with support from the Hightower Fund, and the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology.

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Many scientists believe that the search for simple theories is not optional; rather, it is a requirement of the scientific enterprise. When theories get too complex, scientists reach for Ockham’s razor, the principle of parsimony, to do the trimming. This principle says that a theory that postulates fewer entities, processes, or causes is better than a theory that postulates more, so long as the simpler theory is compatible with what we observe. Ockham’s razor presents a puzzle. It is obvious that simple theories may be beautiful and easy to remember and understand. The hard problem is to explain why the fact that one theory is simpler than another tells you anything about the way the world is. In my lecture, I’ll describe two solutions. (March 15, 2016)

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Hominin remains were discovered in October, 2013 within the Rising Star cave system, inside the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, South Africa. Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand organized excavations with a skilled team of archaeologists and support of local cavers, which have to date uncovered 1550 hominin skeletal specimens. The hominin remains represent a minimum of 15 individuals of a previously undiscovered hominin species, which we have named Homo naledi. Aside from its subtantially smaller brain, H. naledi is cranially similar to early Homo species such as Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and early Homo erectus, but its postcranial anatomy presents a mosaic that has never before been observed, including very humanlike feet and lower legs, a primitive australopith-like pelvis and proximal femur, primitive ribcage and shoulder configuration, generally humanlike wrists and hand proportions, combined with very curved fingers and a powerful thumb. The geological age of the fossils is not yet known. The Dinaledi Chamber contains no macrofauna other than the hominin remains, and geological study of the cave system rules out most hypotheses for the deposition of the hominin bone, including predator or scavenger accumulation, catastrophic death, and flood accumulation. Our preferred hypothesis for the hominin assemblage is deliberate deposition by H. naledi itself. This presentation will review Homo naledi from the initial discovery of the fossils to their interpretation and their relevance to understanding the evolution of human behavior. (February 25, 2016)

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In this talk, drawn from his book, Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Hogan outlines an account of aesthetic response that synthesizes the insights of cognitive neuroscience with those implicit in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Hogan begins by briefly outlining an explanation of beauty based on human information processing (specifically, pattern isolation and prototype approximation). He goes on to consider complications. These complications include the simple, but highly consequential matter of differentiating judgments of beauty from aesthetic response. They also include the relative neglect of literature in neurologically-based discussions of beauty, which tend to focus on music or visual art. There is in addition the potentially more difficult issue of the relative neglect of emotion, beyond the reward system. Related to this last point, there is the very limited treatment of the sublime in empirical research and associated theoretical reflection. After considering these issues broadly, Hogan turns to Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, examining its treatment of beauty and sublimity. The aim of this section is not merely to illuminate Woolf’s novel by reference to neuroscientific research. It is equally, perhaps more fully, to expand our neuroscientifically grounded account of aesthetic response by drawing on Woolf’s novel. (February 18, 2016) Sponsored by the Center for Faculty Development and Excellence’s University Course Initiative, with support from the CMBC.

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Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

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The phenomenon of trigger warnings, intended to help guide students in dealing with the emotions raised by difficult or provocative works of art, indicates the ability of artistic works to raise powerful and even cathartic feelings in members of the audience. The author will discuss the use and abuse of these warnings in relation to works of fiction. (February 12, 2016)

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This paper begins by setting out several important theories of how music is claimed to “express” human emotions.  An inevitable comparison follows with how human emotions are linguistically constituted and expressed.   This, in turn, highlights the complexity of musical “syntax” and “grammar”  as well as the limits of language—or at least the limits of “cognitive” theories of emotion. Contrasting examples of music will be drawn from Bach, Copeland and Art Tatum’s jazz piano .  I will conclude with some threshold questions about how neuropsychology may contribute to our understanding of relations between music and human emotion. (February 12, 2016)

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Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

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Some human emotions are so unloved that few people admit to feeling them. In Western cultures, these include self-pity, resentment, spite, hate, envy, and grudge-bearing. Metaphors for these “banned” emotions reveal their grounding in bodily sensations and postures. At the same time, religious and political beliefs have shaped the ways that these unsavory emotions are represented. To offer insight into the merging forces of culture and physiology, this presentation examines metaphors for “banned” emotions in a tradition that links religious allegories, such as The Inferno and Pilgrim’s Progress, with self-help books such as Emotional Intelligence and Who Moved My Cheese? The families of metaphors used to represent unloved emotions play roles in classic literary works like Great Expectations and Notes from the Underground, but they can also be seen in scientific studies of emotions and in popular films like Bridesmaids. The representation of emotions is a political issue, since not everyone agrees about which emotions should be expressed and how. Emotions that seem obnoxious to one person may be experienced by another as essential to his or her sense of self. (February 12, 2016)

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Self-consciousness and self-conscious emotions are hallmark characteristics of human psychology, a gift and curse from Nature. It is a gift because it allows us to be incomparably creative. It is a curse because it determines uncanny conscious experiences such as the inescapable awareness of impending self-disappearance (death).  I will argue that the fear of separation and the basic affiliation need we share with other animals is for us combined with unmatched preoccupations with reputation, self-preoccupation, and the constant gauging of the self through the evaluative eyes of others. This combination leads to an uncanny capacity for self-delusions, misunderstandings, lies, and other duplicities that are also the trademark of human self-conscious psychology.   I illustrate the emergence of such psychology by presenting some empirical observations collected in recent years on the uncanny mirror self-experience of young children across cultures, social conformity and the emerging sense of sharing as well as material ownership by young children in the US and around the world.   I will conclude with the speculation that universally, as children become self-conscious (in the sense proposed here), they develop the potential for guilt and lies, both signs of emerging moral awareness and the source of new uncanny self-conscious emotions like pride, shame, and envy, all by-products of human self-conscious psychology. (February 12, 2016)

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Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

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Scholarship taking place in philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience have begun to illuminate the complex relationship between the emotional and intellectual contributions to our moral thought and behavior.  However, the assumptions often made in the West – that ethical decision-making should be primarily an intellectual exercise, and that emotional contributions are suspect at best and corrupting at worst should be questioned.  The Dalai Lama, for example, has proffered a system he calls “secular ethics” founded on an emotional platform that he believes can be cultivated for better ethical decisions.  Other faiths, such as Judaism, see a rational ethical method as more reliable.  We need to understand the nuances of both means of moral decision making to be able to untangle their mutual, important contribution to ethical expression. (February 12, 2016)

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In a now classic 1971 paper, Robert Trivers proposed that many human social emotions evolved in response to the need to negotiate relationships based on reciprocal altruism, which were likely crucial to the survival of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. In the same paper, he argued that the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game could serve as a model for relationships based on reciprocal altruism. Over the past 15 years, our lab has utilized the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma game paradigm in combination with fMRI to investigate the neural bases of human social emotions. We have described 1) neural responses to both reciprocated and unreciprocated cooperation, 2) sex differences in these responses, 3) modulation of these responses by psychopathic personality, 4) modulation of these responses by the neuropeptides oxytocin and vasopressin, and 5) modulation of these responses by oxytocin receptor genotypes. In this talk, I will summarize and synthesize the above research, while also integrating findings from other research groups relevant to understanding the neural bases of human social emotions. (February 12, 2016)

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Emotions suffuse much of the language employed by students of animal behavior --from "social bonding" to "alarm calls" -- yet are often avoided as explicit topic in scientific discourse. Given the increasing interest of human psychology in the emotions, and the neuroscience on animal emotions such as fear and attachment, the taboo that has hampered animal research in this area is outdated. We need to recall the history of our field in which emotions and instincts were mentioned in the same breath and in which neither psychologists nor biologists felt that animal emotions were off limits. The main point is to separate emotions from feelings, which are subjective experiences that accompany the emotions. Whereas science has no access to animal feelings, animal emotions are as observable and measurable as human emotions. They are mental and bodily states that potentiate behavior appropriate to both social and nonsocial situations. The expression of emotions in face and body language is well known, the study of which began with Darwin. I will discuss early ideas about animal emotions and draw upon research on empathy and the perception of emotions in primates to make the point that the study of animal emotions is a necessary complement to the study of behavior. Emotions are best viewed as the initiators and organizers of adaptive responses to environmental stimuli. (February 12, 2016)

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Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

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Konner will argue, as he did at length in Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (Norton, 2015), that a current consensus of neural and neuroendocrine research, in the context of neodarwinian sexual selection and phylogenetic, cross-cultural, historical, and psychological perspectives, now suggests that sex differences in some behaviors (notably violence and driven sexuality) and their underlying emotions and motivations require a partly biological explanation. There are no sex differences in general intelligence, or in many measures of cognitive function, skill, motivation, or emotion. Other measures of emotion (for example, the intensity of publicly expressed grief) are strongly influenced by cultural models and show marked cross-cultural variation in the character and degree of gender differences. But the current scientific consensus is that culture (including upbringing, education, models, and media) cannot explain all gender differences in behavior, emotion, and motivation, although it can explain most such differences. Thoughtful people are rightly concerned about the philosophical and political implications of this consensus. Konner will argue that biological facts and perspectives can now be deployed in favor of gender equality rather than against it. (February 11, 2016)

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In this presentation, I describe a feminist sociocultural model of autobiographical memory that provides a framework for understanding how gender and emotion are mutually constructed within everyday reminiscing about the personal past. Autobiographical narratives both reflect and create representations of what happened and what it means for the individual in terms of understanding self, others, and relationships.  In particular, emotional expression within autobiographical narratives carries information about what Bruner has called the “internal landscape of consciousness,” focusing on subjective evaluative meaning.  It is therefore especially interesting that females express more emotion in their autobiographical reminiscing than do males and do so across a wide developmental age span and a variety of contexts. Here, I focus on studies of family reminiscing that demonstrate how parents and children discuss emotions within narratives about their shared past and within intergenerational narratives about the parents’ past in ways that re-create gendered identities across the generations. (February 11, 2016)

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Emotional Regulation Discussion

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Emotions Conference 2016 (6 of 20) | Andrea Scarantino | A New Perspective on Basic Emotions: No Selection without Regulation

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Regulation of emotion is important for adaptive social functioning and mental well-being.  It involves the ability to inhibit or modulate primary emotions to produce contextually appropriate emotions and behaviors. The neural networks underlying this regulatory process will be reviewed and discussed.  Particularly, interactions between the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex are becoming of major interest in understanding the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, and depression. (February 11, 2016)

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Theories and Models of Emotion Discussion (February 11, 2016)

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Is love a judgment, a body process, or a cultural interpretation? Emotion theorists dispute whether emotions are cognitive appraisals, responses to physiological changes, or social constructions. That emotions are all of these can be grasped by identifying brain mechanisms for emotions, including representation by groups of spiking neurons, binding of representations into semantic pointers, and competition among semantic pointers. Semantic pointers are patterns of firing in groups of neurons that function like symbols while incorporating sensory and motor information that can be recovered. Emotions are semantic pointers that bind representations of situations, physiology, and appraisal into unified packages that can guide behavior if they outcompete other semantic pointers. Social and linguistic information is incorporated into cognitive appraisal. This view of emotions is supported by computer simulations (using Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture) that model dynamic appraisal, embodiment, interaction of physiological input and appraisal, and reasoning about emotions. Unlike traditional theories, the semantic pointer theory of emotion can also explain why people have conscious experiences such as happiness and sadness.

Eliasmith, C. (2013). How to build a brain: A neural architecture for biological cognition.

Thagard, P., & Schröder, T. (2014). Emotions as semantic pointers: Constructive neural mechanisms. In L. F. Barrett & J. A. Russell (Eds.), The psychological construction of emotions (pp. 144-167).

Thagard, P., & Stewart, T. C. (2014). Two theories of consciousness: Semantic pointer competition vs. information integration. Consciousness and Cognition, 30, 73-90.

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Neuroimaging and other neuroscience approaches have generated a wealth of new findings about the brain correlates of emotion, for example, changes in brain activity patterns corresponding to variations in emotion intensity and type. Such evidence is playing an increasingly important role in debates about the nature and organization of emotion, for example, whether emotions are best represented by a discrete set of emotions such as fear and anger, and the extent to which dedicated, evolutionarily-shaped neural circuits exist for emotion. The talk will focus on exploring new perspectives that neuroimaging has provided on the brain basis of human emotion and psychological emotion theories. Emotion views which propose that individual emotions or affective dimensions map directly onto the function of specific brain regions have long been influential in neuroscience and psychology, yet there is mounting neuroscience evidence that such one-to-one correspondences between structure and function are illusory and that emotions arise from the complex interactions of multiple brain regions. Neuroimaging findings provide clues about how these distributed brain representations create different emotions and how emotion states can be decoded from patterns of brain activity. Key implications of these findings for existing psychological theories of emotion will be discussed, as well as the need to corroborate correlational neuroimaging findings with other approaches that experimentally manipulate brain activity and structure. (February 11, 2016)

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Research on Pavlovian fear conditioning has been very successful in revealing what has come to be called the “fear system” of the brain.  The field has now matured to the point where a sharper conceptualization of what is being studied could be very useful as we go forward. Terms like “fear conditioning” and “fear system” blur the distinction between processes that give rise to conscious feelings of fear and non-conscious processes that control defense responses elicited by threats. These processes interact but are not the same. This is an important distinction because symptoms based on conscious and non-conscious processes may be vulnerable to different predisposing factors and may also be treatable with different approaches in people who suffer from uncontrolled fear or anxiety. Using terms that respect the distinction will help focus future animal research on brain circuits that detect and respond to threats, and should also help clarify the implications of this work for understanding how normal and pathological feelings of fear come about in the human brain. (February 11, 2016)

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Broadly speaking, empathy is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another” (Iacoboni). More narrowly, an emotion is usually deemed empathic only when “the agent is aware that it is caused by the perceived, imagined, or inferred plight of another, or it expresses concern for the welfare of another” (Maibom). In the broad sense, the tender reciprocal relationship that develops between mother and infant when the mother sings to the baby and the baby responds is a species of empathy through music. In the narrower sense listeners may empathize with the music itself when they are affected by music via emotional contagion – a kind of low-level empathy – to adopt the musical gestures they experience and thereby share the emotion expressed by the music. If, in addition, it’s possible for music to express the emotions of a persona – the performer, the composer or simply a “character” in the music – then listeners can engage in high-level empathy for the persona, imagining feeling the emotions of the persona that are expressed in the music and coming to share them. (February 9, 2016)

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The widely held belief that the diagnosis of mental disorder is a matter exclusively for value-free science has been much reinforced by recent dramatic advances in the neurosciences. In this lecture, I will use a detailed case study of delusion and spiritual experience to indicate to the contrary that values come into the diagnosis of mental disorders directly through the language of the diagnostic criteria adopted in such scientifically–grounded classifications as the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual). Various competing interpretations of the importance of values in psychiatric diagnosis will be considered. Interpreted through the lens of the Oxford tradition of linguistic-analytic philosophy, however, diagnostic values in psychiatry are seen to reflect the complex and often conflicting values of real people. This latter interpretation has the direct consequence that there is a need for processes of assessment in psychiatry that are equally values-based as evidence-based. A failure to recognise this in the past has resulted in some of the worst abusive misuses of psychiatric diagnostic concepts. In the final part of the presentation I will outline recent developments in values-based practice in mental health including some of its applications to diagnostic assessment, and in other areas of health care (such as surgery). (February 3, 2016)

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Normal self-consciousness typically includes the compelling sense that my own experiences belong to me – one person, one whole and unified center of consciousness. That common and compelling feature of wholeness and distinctness often is lost or broken in certain experiences in schizophrenia as well as in mystical or religious experiences. The experience of self-consciousness or self-awareness in schizophrenia often is constituted by dramatic breakdowns in the experience of the self or “I”. Many so-called mystical or religious experiences include similar breakdowns. Such similarities have long been recognized in the literatures on mental illness and mysticism. The question is, ‘What to do about them?’ It would be a mistake to equate mysticism with psychosis but helpful to examine whether the two sorts of experiences are similar in their cognitive foundations. Ecumenical Naturalism (EN) claims that experiences of self in schizophrenia and in mysticism share some of the same cognitive foundations. Various religious social contexts and practices elicit, engage and manipulate those psychological systems in ways that yield thoughts and experiences that are quite similar to those associated with mental disorders like schizophrenia. EN aims to identify those foundations and to compare and contrast the differences in consequences between relevant illnesses and mystical experiences (when not signs of illness). My talk will describe EN, one of its essential assumptions, which is derived from some recent work in the cognitive science of religion, and illustrate its method. The relevant assumption is that religious experiences are sustained by a whole variety of cognitive systems, which are part of our regular psychological equipment, mystical experiences or no mystical experiences, schizophrenia or no schizophrenia. (November 19, 2015)

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Neuromechanical principles define the properties and problems that shape neural solutions for movement. Although the theoretical and experimental evidence is debated, I will present arguments for consistent modular structures in motor patterns that are neuromechanical solutions for movement particular to an individual and shaped by evolutionary, developmental, and learning processes. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015

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Advancements in machine learning and data mining have already led to amazing breakthroughs in the natural sciences, including the unlocking of the human genome and the detection of subatomic particles. Such techniques promise to wield a similar impact on the study of mind. In my talk I will discuss how the large-scale structure of the human mental lexicon, roughly 50,000 words, can be recovered from billions of words at a level of resolution that includes the differentiation of word senses. Central to this effort are several machine learning and dimensionality reduction techniques, including deep learning, t-Distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding (t-SNE), and the clustering technique called GMeans. In addition to the extraction of the mental lexicon, I will discuss how an approach to topic modeling, based on neural networks, might be used to partially automate the process of theory generation. I also raise implications for research on physical and mental wellbeing. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015

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The engineering and applied math communities often exploit the fact that natural stimuli have significant structure that lends itself well to dimensionality reduction. The efficient coding hypothesis for sensory neural coding postulates that stages of neural processing should sequentially make the representations more efficient by removing stimulus redundancies, and this is often expressed in the language of information theory. In this talk I will present our work exploring efficient coding models of vision based on dimensionality reduction, including sparsity, low-rank matrix factorizations and random projections. I will show that such approaches are able to account for many observed properties in visual cortex, including classical receptive fields, response properties based on nonclassical or nonlinear receptive fields, and properties of the inhibitory interneurons. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015

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Animals perform a complex array of behaviors, from changes in body posture to vocalizations to other dynamic outputs. Far from being a disordered collection of actions, however, there is thought to be an intrinsic structure to the set of behaviors and their temporal and functional organization. In this talk, I will introduce a novel method for mapping the behavioral space of organisms. This method relies only upon the underlying structure of postural movement data to organize and classify behavior, eschewing ad hoc behavioral definitions entirely and effectively compressing the vast amounts of data being collected. Applying this method to videos of freely-behaving fruit flies (D. melanogaster), I will show that the organisms’ behavioral repertoire consists of a hierarchically-organized set of stereotyped behaviors. This hierarchical patterning results in the emergence of long time scales of memory in the system, providing insight into the mechanisms of behavioral control over that occur over seconds, minutes, hours, days, and the entire lifetime of the fly. Lastly, I will show the generality of this approach to behavioral analysis — specifically its applicability to other species, alternative behavioral modalities, and high-throughput screens investigating the underlying neurobiology and genetics of behavior. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015

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Most sensory, cognitive, and motor functions rely on the interaction among many neurons. To analyze the activity of many neurons together, many groups are now adopting advanced statistical methods, such as dimensionality reduction. In this talk, I will first describe how dimensionality reduction can be used in a closed-loop experimental setting to understand how learning is shaped by the underlying neural circuitry. Then, I will describe a novel latent variable model that extracts a subject's internal model during sensorimotor control. NEUROSCIENCE WORKSHOP: Dimensionality Reduction Friday, October 30, 2015 Saturday, October 31, 2015

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I discuss two new studies that focus on general questions about the cognitive science and neural implementation of speech and language. I come to (currently) unpopular conclusions about both domains. Based on a first set of experiments, using fMRI and exploiting the temporal statistics of speech, I argue for the existence of a speech-specific processing stage that implicates a particular neuronal substrate that has the appropriate sensitivity and selectivity for speech (Overath et al. 2015). Based on a second set of experiments, using MEG, I show how temporal encoding can form the basis for more abstract, structural processing. The results demonstrate that, during listening to connected speech, cortical activity of different time scales is entrained concurrently to track the time course of linguistic structures at different hierarchical levels. Critically, entrainment to hierarchical linguistic structures is dissociated from the neural encoding of acoustic cues and from processing the predictability of incoming words. These results demonstrate syntax-driven, internal construction of hierarchical linguistic structure via entrainment of hierarchical cortical dynamics (Ding et al. 2015). The conclusions I reach — that speech is special and language syntactic-structure-driven — provide new neurobiological provocations to the prevailing view that speech perception is ‘mere' hearing and that language comprehension is ‘mere' statistics. (October 22, 2015)

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Ritual is a puzzling aspect of behavior, as it involves obvious expenditures of effort, energy and resources without equally obvious payoffs. Evolutionary theorists have long proposed that such costly behaviors would not have survived throughout human history unless they conveyed certain benefits to their practitioners. But what might those benefits be, and how can they be operationalised and measured? This talk will present a series of studies that combined laboratory and field methods to explore the puzzle of ritualized behavior among humans. (October 1, 2015)

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In 1993, Time magazine dubbed Miami “the Capital of Latin America.” At the time, Miami’s Hispanic / Latino population was at roughly 50% and was overwhelmingly Cuban-origin. In the ensuing two decades, Miami’s Hispanic / Latino population has continued to grow, reaching 65% in Miami-Dade County and 78% in the City of Miami in 2010. At the same time, the Cuban-origin share has fallen to below 50%. Both of these developments owe to the economic and political crises in Latin America in the 1990s and 2000s that brought unprecedented numbers of Colombians, Venezuelans, Peruvians, Dominicans, and other Spanish-speaking groups to South Florida. As a result of the socio-demographic changes, Miami is now both the most Latino large city in the U.S. (79%) and the most foreign-born (65%). It is also most likely to be the most bilingual large city in North America and the most dialectally-diverse Spanish speaking city in the world. The richness of the sociolinguistic landscape raises important questions about the ways in which Miami’s linguistic diversity is mentally represented and enacted in social interaction. How are Spanish and English perceived in terms of sociocultural prestige? Which language is thought to be most valuable for success in Miami’s boom-and-bust economy? Do Latinos and non-Latinos differ in their perceptions of English and Spanish? Do Miami residents exhibit implicit biases toward Spanish or English? If so, how do these biases vary according to social categories, such as ethnicity? Do biases co-vary with length of residency in Miami? And does living in Miami strengthen or diminish an individual’s automatic preferences for English or Spanish? In this talk, I present the findings of two ongoing perceptual studies conducted with over 500 residents of Miami-Dade County. The first is a matched guise experiment (Lambert et al. 1956) designed to test perceptions of English and Spanish across a range of sociocultural and socioeconomic factors, including warmth and competence personality traits. The second is an implicit association test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, and Schwartz, 1998) designed to test biases to textual and oral stimuli in Spanish and English. Findings from both studies are considered in light of competing national narratives about Spanish in the United States: Spanish-as-threat (Chavez 2008) and Spanish-as-commodity (Dávila 2008). (September 30, 2015) Sponsored by the CMBC and the Stipe Fund, the Departments of German Studies, French and Italian Studies, Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures (REALC), MIddle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS), the Emory College Language Center (ECLC), and the Program in Linguistics.

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Anthropology has a long history of investigating human variation with the goal of understanding the genetic, environmental, and epigenetic sources of variation existing within and between human populations. Yet the field has historically focused on variation from the neck down. In this discussion we identify inherent challenges to understanding the varieties of mental experience and explore several of the latest methodological advances that have helped researchers better address questions of human brain variation. (September 18, 2015)

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People often choose larger future rewards over smaller immediate ones, but then abandon that choice before the future reward arrives. Examples include starting a diet but then not sticking to it, quitting smoking but then relapsing, and most new year's resolutions. Psychologists often explain such behavior by reference to fundamental limitations in human cognitive systems, such as limited willpower or self-control. I will argue for an alternative explanation, in which the failure to persist toward delayed outcomes arises from a rational reevaluation process regarding temporally uncertain delayed rewards. I will talk about our work showing the critical role of uncertainty in persistence towards future outcomes and examining how different forms of uncertainty are encoded in the brain and affect other neural representations during voluntary persistence. (September 24, 2015)

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We will discuss our collaboration as co-teachers of a course called "Sleep in Science and Culture" and our consultations with each other since. We aim to show how a discussion between disciplines can help define what is normal and what is pathological, and the consequences of making those distinctions. (September 29, 2015)

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In psychology (e.g., Schooler, 2011) and other fields (e.g., Jennions & Møller, 2001), there are reported cases of effect sizes declining over time. Later studies of a given phenomenon report smaller effect sizes than earlier studies. This decline suggests a publication bias toward large effects and regression to the mean. In the current study, we examine whether evidence exists for such a decline effect. In Study 1, we analyzed 3,488 effect sizes across 70 meta-analytic tables, which were drawn from 33 Psychological Bulletin articles (1980–2010). A multilevel analysis revealed no evidence of a linear or quadratic decline effect over time (indexed by publication year). In Studies 2 and 3, we examined 50 meta-analyses each from social psychology and clinical psychology. In both studies, the modal meta-analysis showed no correlation between effect size and publication year. The decline effect in psychology appears to be less prevalent than earlier anecdotal reports suggest. For replications, this finding suggests that expectations that replications will have lower effect sizes than the original may be inaccurate and unfounded. (September 8, 2015)

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In recent years, cultural sociologists have grown increasingly interested in psychology and some influential psychologists (e.g., Oishi et al 2009; Haidt 2012) have argued for closer connections to sociological theory and research. In this talk, I will outline some past and current work in which I have attempted to create bridges between sociology and psychology. I will also consider some concrete ways to improve interdisciplinary research on morality. (September 3, 2015) Sponsored by the Coalition of Graduate Sociologists (COGS) with support from the Department of Sociology and the CMBC.

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A growing body of research points to a significant effect of bilingualism on cognitive outcomes across the lifespan. The main finding is evidence for the enhancement of executive control at all stages in the lifespan, with the most dramatic results being maintained cognitive performance in elderly adults and protection against the onset of dementia. These results shed new light on the question of how cognitive and linguistic systems interact in the mind and brain. I will review evidence from both behavioral and imaging studies and propose a framework for understanding the mechanism that could lead to the reported consequences of bilingualism and the limitation or absence of these effects under some conditions. (November 11, 2015) Sponsored by the CMBC with additional support from the Departments of Psychology, German Studies, French and Italian Studies, Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures (REALC), Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS), the Emory College Language Center (ECLC), the Program in Linguistics, and the Hightower Fund.

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There has recently been an international surge of interest in building large brain models. The European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) has received 1 billion euros worth of funding, and President Obama announced the Brain Initiative along with a similar level of funding. However the large scale models affiliated with both projects do not demonstrate how their generated complex neural activity relates to observable behaviour -- arguably the central challenge for neuroscience. I will present our recent work on large-scale brain modeling that is focussed on both biological realism and reproducing human behaviour. I will demonstrate how the model relates to both low-level neural data and high-level behavioural data. Finally, I will discuss applications of this research to understanding both the biological basis of cognition and building more advanced robots. [March 25, 2015]

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Why is there some “religious stuff” in all human societies? A tempting answer is that religions are somehow grounded in evolved properties of human minds. Recently, some have even suggested that religion could have been selected for ensuring large-scale cooperation and prosocial behavior. Considering the empirical evidence leads to a more sober understanding of the evolutionary processes underpinning the emergence and spread of religious concepts and norms. The term “religion” misleadingly lumps together three very different kinds of social-cultural processes, unlikely to have spread in the same contexts. I propose to model the diffusion of religious concepts in terms of cultural epidemics based on universal cognitive dispositions, showing how some (not all) religious concepts can serve as recruitment devices in building coalitions. [March 24, 2015]

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An essential feature of any society is the capacity of its members to distinguish one another from outsiders and reject outsiders on that basis. Some social insects and humans are able to form huge societies because their membership is anonymous—members aren’t required to distinguish all the other members as individuals for the society to remain unified. Societies are instead bonded by shared identity cues and signals, such as society-specific odors in ants and learned social labels in humans. I contrast this with societies of nonhuman vertebrates, which achieve a maximum of 200 members by the necessity that each member recalls every other member individually. The capacity to form an anonymous society is a complex trait that I will show could have arisen in our ancestors well before language. While there has been a perennial focus on the cooperative networks that emerge inside each society, identification with a clearly defined group of members, and not coop­eration or kinship as many experts assert, is the most fundamental defining characteristic of societies in humans and other animals. I will discuss how this identification bears on aggression in humans and other animals. [March 5, 2015]

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The language(s) that we know shape the way we process and represent the speech that we hear. Since real-world speech recognition almost always takes place in conditions that involve some sort of background noise, we can ask whether the influence of linguistic knowledge and experience on speech processing extends to the particular challenges posed by speech-in-noise recognition, specifically the perceptual separation of speech from background noise (Experiment Series 1) and the cognitive representation of speech and concurrent background noise (Experiment Series 2). In Experiment Series 1, listeners were asked to recognize English sentences embedded in a background of competing speech that was either English (matched-language, English-in-English recognition) or another language (mismatched-language, e.g. English-in-Mandarin recognition). Listeners were either native or non-native listeners of the target language (usually, English), and were either familiar or unfamiliar with the language of the to-be-ignored, background speech (English, Mandarin, Dutch, or Croatian). This series of experiments demonstrated that matched-language speech-in-speech recognition is substantially harder than mismatched-language speech-in-speech recognition. Moreover, the magnitude of the mismatched-language benefit was modulated by long-term linguistic experience (specifically, listener familiarity with the background language), as well as by short-term adaptation to a consistent background language within a test session. Thus, we conclude that speech recognition in conditions that involve competing background speech engages higher-level, experience-dependent, language-specific knowledge in addition to general lower-level, signal-dependent processes of auditory stream segregation. Experiment Series 2 then investigated perceptual classification and encoding in memory of spoken words and concurrently presented background noise. Converging evidence from eye-tracking, speeded classification, and continuous recognition memory paradigms strongly suggests parallel (rather than strictly sequential) processes of stream segregation and word identification, as well as integrated (rather than segregated) cognitive representations of speech presented in background noise. Taken together, this research is consistent with models of speech processing and representation that allow interactions between long-term, experience-dependent linguistic knowledge and instance-specific, environment-dependent sources of speech signal variability at multiple levels, ranging from relatively early/low levels of selective attention to relatively late/high levels of lexical encoding and retrieval. [March 3, 2015]

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Collective memory—sometimes referred to as public memory, or social (or cultural) memory—is a term commonly used in the humanities. It posits the act of remembering as ineluctably linked to what the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (who is credited with elaborating the concept) called the “social frameworks” of memory such as family, class, ethnic, national or religious communities. Within these social frameworks, an individual’s recollection of events is shaped by the shared experience of that event as the group in question frames it. Cognitive scientists, on the other hand, speak in terms of personal memory, distinguishing among three types—procedural, semantic, and episodic—that enable individuals to register and recall a range of experiences. How do we go from the multiplicity of private, individual memories to the potential unity of collective memory? Inversely, can the collective memory of an event shared by a social group influence the way an individual recollects her experience of that same event? For humanists the concept of collective memory is a useful analytical tool, while scientists find it questionable, if not useless to their inquiries. Can we--humanists and scientists—talk across these differences and, if so, how? Our discussion will address this question on the basis of a CMBC-sponsored seminar in the field of Memory Studies to see what common ground may exist to facilitate bridges between scientific and humanistic inquiry in this field. [February 24, 2015]

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The time seems right to rethink how the fields of cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience could take advantage of each other. Both fields make use of quantitative models, one of cognitive processes the other of brain processes. Since the brain ultimately supports cognitive processes one should think these levels of description should merge. Interestingly that has largely not happened yet. We will discuss possible approaches and areas of content where such overlap might become possible in the near future. [February 19, 2015]

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Few would contest the claim that Shakespeare was a great poet and playwright. Less indisputable, perhaps, is the notion that he was also a great social theorist. By this, I'm not referring to theory in the weak sense of occasional philosophically nuanced comments by characters, or speeches with philosophical overtones. I mean that Shakespeare was a social theorist in the strong sense that, in addition to being powerful stories, his plays often are extended reflections on many of the classic issues of social thought. If I'm right about this, it raises an important question about literary technique and voice. Normally the analytical voice of the theorist is very different and in some sense in tension with the narrative voice of the dramatist or novelist. Reconciling the requirements of effective theoretical analysis and affecting dramatic narrative is a major challenge. This talk, adapted from my upcoming book on Shakespeare and social theory, deals with one important way in which Shakespeare accomplished this literary pas de deux by adapting anamorphic projection, a visual technique perfected by Renaissance painters, to literary narrative. Anamorphosis developed in relation to the Renaissance science of optics and its far-reaching effects on perspective. While anamorphic projection has been widely appreciated in the history of painting, its use as a holographic literary technique is less well-known, and its use by Shakespeare as a way of expanding the semantic range of his plays is virtually unappreciated. [February 5, 2015]

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We now recognize that our brains are more plastic than once imagined.  Research in neurobiology has shown that how our brains function is shaped by reciprocal influences between genetics, development, behavior, culture, and environment.  However, much of this research has been done in laboratory and clinical settings, without concurrent examination of how brains vary in the wild.  This talk will outline the field of neuroanthropology using prominent examples including addiction and balance, and then reflect on how this synergy of neuroscience and anthropology emerged out of the biocultural approach pioneered at Emory. November 13, 2014


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What does it mean for a musician to “think musical thoughts”?  How does such thinking interact with processes that seem more like “feeling” than thinking? And how do both relate in real time to pre-established habits of thought and feeling, communal conventions regarding interpretation and performance, one’s own highly trained but flexible motor routines, and feedback from hearing oneself?  We look at such questions (as time permits) from the perspective of music study, rehearsal and performance, especially in small ensembles, where awareness of other performers’ roles and a sense of the musical whole are additional crucial factors.   Finally, how are all these factors coordinated in real time performance?  Who or what—if anything--is in charge? October 16, 2014


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Thursday, 4:00 pm, PAIS 290 We have known for more than forty years that the brains of humans and other animals are sexually dimorphic. That is, there are reliable differences in the average size, shape, and connectivity of male and female brains. While the existence of neural sex differences is beyond dispute, their significance is controversial. What do neural sex differences mean for social norms, mental health, and the perennial argument about “nature vs. nurture”? This talk will focus on the neuroscience of sex differences. The speaker will describe how sex differences in the brain are typically studied and how the factors that influence their development have been identified. Gonadal hormones such as testosterone and estrogen play a major role in establishing sex differences. Yet at the same time, sex-typical experiences are also important in the development of male and female brains. That is, both hormones and hormone-driven experience seem to be necessary for the normal development and expression of sex-typical brains and behaviors. Many complex psychiatric conditions, such as drug abuse, anxiety, and depression, vary by sex in terms of their prevalence, age-of-onset, and severity. Thus, while sex differences are intrinsically interesting, they may also provide clues about the origins of mental illness and potential treatments. The final part of the talk will focus on Dr. Cooke’s research at Georgia State University in which he and his students have sought to identify factors that influence the sex-specific prevalence of mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. He will describe their efforts to develop a model of adverse early experience and its impact on anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in the laboratory rat. October 2, 2014
 Many complex psychiatric conditions, such as drug abuse, anxiety, and depression, vary by sex in terms of their prevalence, age-of-onset, and severity. Thus, while sex differences are intrinsically interesting, they may also provide clues about the origins of mental illness and potential treatments. The final part of the talk will focus on Dr. Cooke’s research at Georgia State University in which he and his students have sought to identify factors that influence the sex-specific prevalence of mood disorders such as anxiety and depression. He will describe their efforts to develop a model of adverse early experience and its impact on anxiety- and depression-like behaviors in the laboratory rat. Finally, and if time permits, Dr. Cooke will present some exciting new data concerning his lab's use of a novel brain - computer interface to study sex differences at the neural network level. 

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Over a decade ago, I proposed that memory errors can b e classified into seven fundamental categories or "sins": transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. During the past decade, much has been learned about each of the seven sins, especially as a result of research that has combined the methods of psychology and neuroscience. This presentation will provide an update on our current understanding of the seven sins, with a focus on the sins of absent-mindedness (failures of attention that result in memory errors) and misattribution (when information is mistakenly assigned to the wrong source, resulting in memory distrotions such as false recognition). I will discuss recent research on absent-mindedness that has examined the role of mind wandering in memory for lectures, and will present evidence indicating that interpolated testing can counter such absent-minded lapses. I will also discuss recent research that has clarified both cognitive and neural aspects of misattribution, and consider evidence for the idea that misattribution and other memory sins can be conceived of as byproducts of otherwise adaptive features of memory. September 29, 2014


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The development of psychopathology occurs through the complex interplay of genes, experience, and the brain.  In this talk, I will describe a developmental neurogenetics approach to understanding the development of psychopathology.  In this approach, individual variability in genetic background is linked to neural function and subsequent risk and resilience through interactions with the environment. Guided by a developmental psychopathology framework, I will give examples of approaches to link genes, brain, behavior, and experience, with a particular emphasis on studies from my lab aimed at understanding the development of antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, theft, and violation of serious rules). These examples highlight the role of serotonin genes on amygdala reactivity, the role of amygdala reactivity in antisocial behavior, and the importance of identifying subtypes of antisocial behavior such as callous-unemotional traits and psychopathy that may have different etiologies. September 24, 2014


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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

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Some things are easier to mix together than others. There is the proverbial problem of mixing oil and water, but then there is also the smooth blending of coffee and cream. Bringing together students from film studies and psychology in order to study theory of mind might best be described as midway between these extremes—for us the best metaphor is peanut butter and chocolate—not always easy to integrate, but the result is well worth it (as the Reese’s candy folks have shown).

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in collaboration between the social sciences and the humanities. Venerable humanities journals such as Style now publish reports on digital analyses of modern and classic texts as well as writings discussing the evolutionary significance of fiction. Publications such as The Scientific Study of Literature and The Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts have appeared. It should come as no surprise that there is controversy surrounding these new "Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups." Our CMBC lunch discussion will represent an effort to identify some of the main questions surrounding the mixing of empirical/theoretical social science and the humanities. We hope that the gathered company will consider the pros and cons of such a blend (which has a history dating back to Freud’s analysis of Leonardo daVinci’s relationship with his mother!) and enjoy a good discussion. We cannot say what the lunch will comprise, but the dessert will be….well, you might be able to guess.

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‘Willusionists’ argue that science is discovering that free will is an illusion. Their arguments take a variety of forms, but they often suggest that if the brain is responsible for our actions, then we are not.  And they predict that ordinary people share this view.  I will discuss some evidence that most people do not think that free will or responsibility conflict with the possibility that our decisions could be perfectly predicted based on earlier brain activity.  I will consider why this possibility might appear problematic but why it shouldn’t.  Once we define free will properly, we see that neuroscience and psychology can help to explain how it works, rather than explain it away.  Human free will is allowed by a remarkable assembly of neuropsychological capacities, including imagination, control of attention, valuing, and ‘self-habituation’. September 17, 2014

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Rituals pose a cognitive paradox: although widely used to treat problems, they are cultural conventions and lack causal explanations for their effects. How do people evaluate the efficacy of rituals in the absence of causal information? To address this question, I have examined the kinds of information that influence perceptions of ritual efficacy experimentally (Legare & Souza, 2012; 2013). I conducted three studies (N = 162) in Brazil, a cultural context in which rituals called simpatias are used to treat a great variety of problems ranging from asthma to infidelity. Using ecologically-valid content, I designed experimental simpatias to manipulate the kinds of information that influence perceptions of efficacy (e.g., repetition, number of procedural steps). The results provide evidence that information reflecting intuitive causal principles affects how people evaluate ritual efficacy. I propose that the structure of ritual is the product of an evolved cognitive system of intuitive causality.

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As a group, we will examine the kinds of ritualistic remedies used to treat a great variety of problems across highly diverse cultural contexts and vast stretches of historical time. Our objective will be to identify the kinds of information people may use to evaluate the efficacy of these pervasive cultural practices.

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In the context of three major Mediterranean modes of religious thought and practice—mythical, philosophical, and ritual—early Christians produced writings during the first century CE that exhibit six discursive-religious forms of life. The conceptual blending of time, space, and body in this discursive-religious environment created interactive emergence identifiable as prophetic, apocalyptic, wisdom, precreation, miracle, and priestly thought and practice. Rhetography, which is rhetoric that evokes graphic images and pictures in the mind, working interactively with rhetology, which is rhetoric that produces verbal argumentation, nurtured such energetic cognitive-conceptual blends that their effects are still observable in Christianity today. This presentation will feature a combination of past results and recent insights from Emory Sawyer Seminars on Visual Exegesis and Hermeneutics

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Scientific research on meditation has grown exponentially in the last two decades, yet that research often remains disconnected from the academic study of religion. Likewise, cognitive scientific approaches to religion often seem irrelevant to the scientific study of meditation. Why do these fields of research largely fail to interact, and what does it tell us about our notion of religion?

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In both lay and scientific writing, natural explanations (potentially knowable and empirically verifiable phenomena of the physical world) and supernatural explanations (phenomena that violate or operate outside of, or distinct from, the natural world) are often conceptualized in contradictory or incompatible terms. My research has demonstrated that this common assumption is psychologically inaccurate. I propose instead that the same individuals frequently use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the very same events. To support this hypothesis, my colleagues and I reviewed converging developmental data on the coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations from diverse cultural contexts in three areas of biological thought: the origin of species, the acquisition of illnesses, and the causes of death (Legare, Evans, Rosengren, & Harris, 2012; Legare & Visala, 2011; Legare & Gelman, 2008). We identified multiple predictable and universal ways in which both kinds of explanations coexist in individual minds at proximate and ultimate levels of analysis. For example, synthetic thinking (i.e., combining two kinds of explanations without integration), integrative thinking (i.e., integrating two kinds of explanations by distinguishing proximate and ultimate causes), and target-dependent thinking (i.e., two kinds of explanations remain distinct and are used to explain different aspects of an event, depending on contextual information) all illustrate different kinds of explanatory coexistence. We also discovered that supernatural explanations often increase, rather than decrease, with age. Reasoning about supernatural phenomena, in short, seems to be an integral and enduring aspect of human cognition, not a transient or ephemeral element of childhood cognition.

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Imitation is multifunctional; it is crucial not only for the transmission of instrumental skills but also for learning cultural conventions such as rituals (Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013; Legare & Herrmann, 2013). Despite the fact that imitation is a pervasive feature of children’s behavior, little is known about the kinds of information children use to determine when an event provides an opportunity for learning instrumental skills versus cultural conventions. In my talk I will discuss a program of research aimed at developing an integrated theoretical account of how children use imitation flexibly as a tool for cultural learning. I propose that the cognitive systems supporting flexible imitation are facilitated by the differential activation of an instrumental stance (i.e., rationale based on physical causation) and a ritual stance (i.e., rationale based on cultural convention). I will present evidence that the instrumental stance increases innovation and the ritual stance increases imitative fidelity, the dual engines of cultural learning.

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We hypothesize that when people engage sacred values that underpin many political conflicts, they behave differently than when operating with the more mundane values of the marketplace and normal social interactions. Given the importance of sacred values, and their potential for triggering violent conflict, it is important to understand how sacred values become intertwined in decision making. Traditionally, this type of investigation has been the purview of anthropology and sociology. However, recent advances in functional brain imaging make it possible to use this technology to uncover biological signatures in the brain for sacred values and the neural systems that come online when they are violated.

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While ritualized behavior is not exclusively associated with religious experience, there is clearly a powerful affinity between religion and ritual. A look at the evolutionary roots of human ritual and several of its cognitive and experiential characteristics sheds interesting light on some of the underlying reasons for this affinity.

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Theorists in the cognitive science of religion have proposed that many religious proclivities are by-products of garden-variety cognitive systems that humans share. This general theoretical proposal has generated a variety of notable experimental findings pertaining to such matters as the character and memorability of religious representations, the failure of religious participants to deploy orthodox beliefs in on-line cognitive processing, and the human penchant for “promiscuous teleology.” Subsequent influences on the cognitive science of religion over the past fifteen years do not differ from those affecting cognitive science more broadly. Perhaps the three most prominent of those influences concern evolutionary considerations, the growing availability of brain imaging tools, and an interest in religious experience and embodiment. Each has inspired experimental studies that have produced comparably significant findings concerning such topics as developmental regularities in reasoning about the afterlife, the impact of public ritual participation and other forms of costly signaling on commitment to religious groups (in particular), neural evidence implicating theory of mind in prayer, the impact of synchronous bodily movements on pain thresholds, and more.

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A focus on interpretation at the expense of explanation in the humanities, particularly religious studies, an insistence on the autonomy of the social sciences at the cost of underestimating the value of psychology, and an overemphasis on cultural differences while being blind to human commonalities in anthropology all presented obstacles to developing a theoretically sophisticated, empirically tractable science of religion until the cognitive revolution provide the means and methods to do so.

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Enabling computers to understand images remains one of the hardest open problems in artificial intelligence. No machine vision system comes close to matching human ability at identifying the contents of images or visual scenes or at recognizing similarity between different scenes, even though such abilities pervade human cognition. In this talk I will describe research---currently in early stages---on bridging the gap between low-level perception and higher-level image understanding by integrating a cognitive model of pattern recognition and analogy-making with a neural model of the visual cortex. (April 9, 2014)

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What can we learn from brain imaging, and what are its limits? Drs. Gregory Berns and Scott Lilienfeld will discuss – and debate – the promise and perils of brain imaging with regard to mind-reading, neuromarketing, lie detection, criminal responsibility, and psychiatric diagnosis. More broadly, they will explore scientific and ethical controversies concerning neuroimaging, and strive to separate fact from fiction in both popular and academic coverage of this technology. (March 27, 2014)

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Relationships between genes and social behavior have historically been viewed as a one-way street, with genes in control. Recent analyses have challenged this view by discovering broad alterations in the expression of human genes as a function of differing socio-environmental conditions. My talk summarizes the developing field of social genomics, and its efforts to identify the types of genes subject to social regulation, the biological signaling pathways mediating those effects, and the genetic polymorphisms that moderate socio-environmental influences on human gene expression. This approach provides a concrete molecular perspective on how external social conditions interact with our genes to shape the functional characteristics of our bodies, and alter our future biological and behavioral responses based on our personal transcriptional histories. (March 25, 2014)

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Recent advances in network science have greatly increased our understanding of the structure and function of many networked systems, ranging from transportation networks, to social networks, the internet, ecosystems, and biochemical and gene transcription pathways. Network approaches are also increasingly applied to the brain, at several levels of scale from cells to entire nervous systems. Early studies in this emerging field of brain connectomics have focused on mapping brain network topology and identifying some of its characteristic features, including small world attributes, modularity and hubs. More recently, the emphasis has shifted towards linking brain network topology to brain dynamics, the patterns of functional interactions that emerge from spontaneous and evoked neuronal activity. I will give an overview of recent work characterizing the structure of complex brain networks, with particular emphasis on studies demonstrating how the network topology of the connectome constrains and shapes its capacity to process and integrate information. (Feb. 24, 2014)

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Critiquing a number of stubborn clichés about autism and embracing the concept of neurodiversity, Savarese presents the work of Tito Mukhopadhyay, a man whom the medical community would describe as “severely autistic” and whom he has been mentoring for the past five years. (Feb. 20, 2014) The author of Reasonable People, which Newsweek called “a real life love story and an urgent manifesto for the rights of people with neurological disabilities” and the co-editor of “Autism and the Concept of Neurodiversity,” a special issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, Ralph James Savarese can be seen in the award-winning documentaryLoving Lampposts: Living Autistic and in a forthcoming documentary about his son, DJ, Oberlin College’s first nonspeaking student with autism. He spent the academic year 2012/2013 as a neurohumanities fellow at Duke University’s Institute for Brain Sciences.

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This collaborative discussion turns attention to gender in the academy (February 21, 2014). How are academic work and the academic workplace gendered? We approach these broad questions not simply from the perspective of relative numbers, promotion records, pay, etc. of women/men in the ranks of students, staff, faculty and administrators, but by exploring the subtle dimensions and performances of gender that shape the very fabric of academic work and workplace practices.

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Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Lecture (January 31, 2014). The represented face is so ubiquitous and important to narrative film that it deserves separate consideration. In this talk I define and defend what I call a “cognitive cultural” approach to film theory and illustrate its usefulness with an analysis of some key functions of facial representation in The Silence of the Lambs (1991).  I begin by arguing that biology and psychology have much to offer film studies, using as an example Steven J. Gould’s “A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse.” I go on to summarize the most important research into the uses of the face in narrative film. My analysis of The Silence of the Lambs, finally, is meant to show that cognitive cultural studies of film, by exploring the interface between mind, film, and culture, not only helps us understand the film medium generally, but but also particular films in their broad social and historical context.

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In 2012, an interdisciplinary team of scientists at the University of Oxford reported that, based on their clinical experiment, the beta-blocker drug, Propranolol, could reduce implicit racial bias among its users. Whites were given a single oral dose of the drug, then asked to complete the Implicit Association Test, a reliable measure of racial prejudice. Relative to the placebo, those who were given Propranolol experienced no indicators of implicit racial bias. Though the researchers warned of the danger in biological research being used to make a “more moral society,” they also asserted “such research raises the tantalizing possibility that our unconscious racial attitudes could be modulated using drugs.” Shortly after the experiment, an article in Time Magazine, citing the study, asked the question that frames our project: Is racism becoming a mental illness?

My new book project traces the genealogies of race and racism as psychopathological categories from mid-19th century Europe and the United States up to the aforementioned clinical experiment at the University of Oxford. Using historical, archival, and content analysis, we provide a rich account for how the 19th century ‘Sciences of Man’, including anthropology, medicine, and biology, used race as a means of defining psychopathology at the very beginning of modern clinical psychiatry and subsequently how these claims about race and madness became embedded within claims of those disciplines that deal with mental health and illness. Finally, we describe the contemporary shift in explaining racism occurring since the end of World War II – from that of a social, political, and cultural consequence to that of a pathological byproduct.

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Panel discussion follows film screening of "Shadows and Illuminations" (Oct. 22, 2013).

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Panel discussion follows film screenings of "Ritual Burdens" and "Kites and Monsters" (Oct. 22, 2013).

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Director and anthropologist Dr. Robert Lemelson screens and discusses his films on culture, psychology, mental illness, and personal experience, which are based on years of fieldwork conducted in Indonesia since 1997 (October 22-23, 2013).

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Film and Lecture Series | Jim Hoesterey and Bradd Shore | Afflictions: Culture and Mental Illness in Indonesia – PANEL DISCUSSION on Religion and Faith

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CMBC Lecture held September 27, 2013
. Why do we unite such different kinds of objects as music, literature and painting together under the rubric of art? The tradition of the sister arts since Plato has been built on such connections, but perhaps it ought to seem strange that we associate objects and events that appeal to us so differently, through different senses and in different forms. Understanding aesthetics depends on our being able to comprehend why we do so, why a painting by Van Gogh, a poem by Keats, and a fugue by Bach are moving in similar ways. As I explore what makes this is possible (the neuroscience of emotion and reward, the functioning of imagery, and the operations of the default mode network, I arrive at an answer to my second question, which is what kind of knowledge do aesthetic pleasures bring? Ultimately, I argue that aesthetics offers a model for understanding how the brain responds to unpredictable rewards, and how novelty helps drive our mental economies.

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Laura Otis and Philippe Rochat discussed unsavory human emotions from literary, physiological, and evolutionary perspectives. Otis will give an overview of her 2012 CMBC course, Cognitive Science and Fiction, and its role in inspiring a new research project on metaphors used to represent self-pity, anger, hate, and refusal to forgive. In descriptions of these emotions, religious, socio-political, and gender assumptions merge, but representations of these emotions also suggest the ways that minds and bodies interact to produce the feelings people experience. Otis offers some preliminary observations about metaphors for these emotions in classical literary and religious texts and in some recent films. Rochat discusses his research on fairness, jealousy, envy, fear of losing, and other human emotions surrounding the concept of possession. He considers, based on his and other developmental observations, the evolutionary roots of these emotions and whether they, along with related feelings such as shame and guilt, are specific to humans.

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Talk sponsored by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture on March 4, 2013.

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We will explore how people vary in their individual experiences of mental imagery and how this might relate to their creative abilities, with particular reference to writing. Then we will consider neural processes that underlie imagery and its variable expression across individuals.

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Psychiatric science presumes that hallucinations are an uninteresting byproduct of psychosis. This comparison of the voices heard by people with schizophrenia suggests that there are significant cultural variations between the voice-hearing experiences, and that these differences may have implications for treatment. The paper argues that the differences arise because of differences in local theories of mind.

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What were the factors that contributed to the outcome of the 2012 Presidential Election?  How did campaign tactics, current events, the media, and the changing face of the electorate influence voter turnout and voting patterns? Insights will be provided from a political science perspective on election forecasting and polling, and from a psychology perspective on campaign messaging and the roles of emotion and cognition in voters’ decision making.

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Talk sponsored by the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture on February 7, 2013.

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CMBC Talk, Fall Semester, 2012

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CMBC Talk, Fall Semester, 2012

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Talk from "Fairness Conference: An Interdisciplinary Reflection on the Meanings of Fairness." Co-sponsored by the Emory Office of the Provost, the Emory Cognition Project, the Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, and the Emory Center for Ethics, October 18-19, 2012.

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Maria Kozhevnikov (Department of Radiology, Harvard University Medical School)

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The Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture celebrates its 5th Anniversary by hosting a special lecture on September 29, 2012, with Frans de Waal (C.H. Candler Professor of Psychology; Director, Living Links Center) and Dietrich Stout (Assistant Professor, Anthropology). Each gives a 15-minute lecture followed by a brief question and answer session.

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David Rakison, a psychologist at Carnegie Mellon University, talks about "Mechanisms of Infant Learning: Evolution’s Solution to Adaptive Problems" at Emory University on September 24, 2012. The talk was sponsored by the Emory Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture, which fosters inquiry, research, and teaching from multiple perspectives. For more information, see http://cmbc.emory.edu/

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George Graham (Philosophy and Neuroscience, Georgia State University) gives a talk entitled "Mental Disorder, Brain Disorder and Therapeutic Intervention," sponsored by Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain and Culture (September 20, 2012).

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We will explore how people vary in their individual experiences of mental imagery and how this might relate to their creative abilities, with particular reference to writing. Then we will consider neural processes that underlie imagery and its variable expression across individuals.

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Humans have language, which is a form of communication. Other animals have communication, but not language. This is usually how the debate about the uniqueness of our "language instinct" is summarized. But then there are apes that have learned symbolic communication, honey bees with dance language, and other possible exceptions. So, how unique is human language? Two experts of primate behavior debate the issue.

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Metaphors Conference (5 of 5) | Laura Otis, Krish Sathian | Metaphors and the Mind Panel Discussion

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David Kemmerer (Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences; Psychological Sciences, Purdue University)

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Joseph Skibell (Creative Writing Program)

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Anjan Chatterjee (Neurology, University of Pennsylvania)

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Jim Grimsley (Creative Writing Program)

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How does one transform a literary narrative into film? What is the difference between writing for a narrative text and writing for a film? How might the author invoke scene, place, character and other elements differently depending on the medium? This discussion session highlights Dr. Rushdie's expertise in narrative and how it functions in a variety of forms.

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Clare Porac (Psychology, Pennsylvania State University)

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This lunch session addresses the course of Dr. Ender’s engagement with the concept of graphology, focusing specifically on implications of the emergent transition from hand-written, manuscript technologies to digital modes of writing and archival expression. This talk surveys several approaches to this transition in contemporary empirical research with the goal of opening up productive new possibilities for encounters between humanistic and scientific perspectives. Co-sponsored by the Hightower Fund, the Department of French and Italian, The Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, the Department of Art History, the Department of Comparative Literature, the Department of English, the Program in Linguistics, the Graduate Institute of Liberal Arts.

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Lauren Harris (Psychology, Michigan State University)

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Barbara Maria Stafford (Georgia Institute of Technology)

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Todd Preuss (Yerkes National Primate Research Center)

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Susan A. Nolan (Seton Hall University)

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Perspectives on Emotion

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Nancy J. Nersessian (School of Interactive Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology)

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What is language?

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Brain Evolution Workshop (6 of 6) | Craig Hadley | What's Human about the Human Brain? Exploring Evolutionary Specializations of the Human Brain

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Dietrich Stout on "Technology and Cognitive Evolution: What's human about the human brain? Exploring evolutionary specializations of the human brain." From Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Summer 2011 Workshop, (May 25-27, 2011)

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Dietrich Stout "Archaeological and Paleontological Record of Human Cognitive Evolution: What's human about the human brain? Exploring evolutionary specializations of the human brain." From Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Summer 2011 Workshop, May 25-27, 2011."

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Jim Rilling, "_Structural Brain Imaging Methods: What's human about the human brain? Exploring evolutionary specializations of the human brain." From Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Summer 2011 Workshop, May 25-27, 2011."

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Todd Preuss "Fundamentals of Evolutionary Neuroscience: What's human about the human brain? Exploring evolutionary specializations of the human brain." From Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Summer 2011 Workshop, May 25-27, 2011."

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Todd Preuss on "Introduction of study of Brain Evolution: What's human about the human brain? Exploring evolutionary specializations of the human brain." From Emory University's Center for Mind, Brain, and Culture Summer 2011 Workshop, May 25-27, 2011."

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Konrad Talmont-Kaminsky (Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin, Poland)

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What Does the Brain Have to Do with Sex and Gender

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Zombies in Hollywood are the animated dead but philosophers have been talking for centuries about zombies in a different sense–the idea that we are all simply soulless machines. Is it inevitable that we're all just zombies? Dr. Neill and Dr. Goldenbaum debate this issue -- draw your own conclusions!

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Stella Lourenco (Psychology) and Leslie Taylor (Theater Studies)

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Origins of Human Sociality

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Mind and Brain from the Perspective of Buddhism and Western Science

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John Johnston (English) and Sidney Perkowitz (Physics)

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Perceiving Injustice

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Joseph Henrich, University of British Columbia | On the Origins of a Cultural Species: How Social Learning Shaped Human Evolution | Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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Frans de Waal, Yerkes Primate Center, Emory University | Prosocial Primates: Empathy, Fairness, and Cooperation | Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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Deborah Lieberman, University of Miami | It's All Relative: The Evolution of Psychological Mechanisms Governing Kin Detection, Incest Avoidance, and Altruism | Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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Melvin Konner, Emory Anthropology | Childhood Evolving: The Role of Development in the Evolution of Mind | Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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Todd Preuss | the Human Brain: Rewired and Running Hot Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture Conference

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Richard Passingham, | How to Turn a Chimpanzee into a Person | Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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James Rilling | Comparative Higher Primate Neuroimaging: Insights into the Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture

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Matt Ridley | Darwin in Genes and Culture / Evolution of Brain, Mind, and Culture