Regular colloquia are Wednesdays, 2:00 P.M. – 4:00 P.M., in 280 Park Hall (unless otherwise noted), North Campus, and are open to the public. To receive email announcements of each event, please subscribe to one of our mailing lists by clicking the link that best describes you: student, UB Faculty and Staff, or Non-UB Cognitive Scientist. You can also subscribe to our calendar.
Background readings for each lecture are available to UB faculty and students on UB Learns. To access, please log in to UB Learns and select "Center for Cognitive Science" → "Course Documents" → "Background Readings for (Semester/Year)." If you are affiliated with UB and do not have access to the UBLearns website, please contact Eduardo Mercado III, director of the Center for Cognitive Science.
January 31
February 7
Speaker: Sarah Muldoon
Associate Professor, Department of Mathematics, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Personalized Brain Network Models (BNMs) are a computational tool that simulate a specific individual’s brain activity based on measured structural brain connections. These models have been shown to be sensitive to individual differences in brain network structure and allow one to perform in silico experiments in order to make predictions about the effects of stimulation, disease progression, or drug treatment at the level of a specific individual. I will describe how one builds such computational models from neuroimaging data and describe work using personalized BNMs to explore individual differences in brain structure and function.
February 28
Speaker: Robert Hawkins
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Why do we use language differently with different partners? In this talk, I will argue for a computational approach to sociolinguistics, which formalizes the obstacles standing in the way of effective communication and explains how people construct shared meaning to achieve their communicative goals with different audiences. Specifically, I'll present a computational model of partner-specific coordination and convention via hierarchical Bayesian inference — using feedback from a partner to update one's beliefs about what is meaningful to them. I test predictions of the model in two natural-language communication experiments where participants are grouped into small communities for a referential communication task. Finally, I'll discuss ongoing work exploring broader implications across four areas: (1) code-switching and the relationship between language and social identity, (2) neural mechanisms of common ground in a hyper scanning study, (3) developmental trajectories of sociolinguistic competence, and (4) artificial agents that can flexibly construct meaning with human partners.
March 13
Speaker: Jessica Huber
Professor, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY
In this talk, I will review what I have learned about how we control our respiratory (breathing) system to ensure successful communication exchanges. Prior to the 1990s, the respiratory system was viewed as a “pump” – simply producing pressure that was modulated by the rest of the speech system to make communication possible. I will review evidence that motor planning and execution of the respiratory system is adjusted to achieve specific communication goals (in a variety of tasks, environments, and contexts). I will also discuss how language and cognitive load can impact how we breathe and speak. I will apply these principles to people with communication disorders due to neurodegenerative diseases (like Parkinson disease) and to the impact of treatments on respiratory planning and execution.
March 27
Speaker: Valerie Langlois
Post-doctoral Researcher, Department of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of Colorado - Boulder
Understanding the processes involved in how language ambiguity is resolved has been a central question in psycholinguistics. One proposal is that domain-general processes like cognitive control play a role in resolving conflict between linguistic representations. However, there is a lack of consensus about which sorts of language processing challenges do or do not engage cognitive control. I will present new evidence showing that theta-band oscillations (4Hz to 8Hz) can index cognitive control engagement. In “While Anna dressed the baby spit up…”, people must decide between a frequent but syntactically unsupported interpretation (Anna dressing the baby), and a syntactically licensed but improbable interpretation (Anna dressing herself). In these sentences, we find an increase in theta-band power. In contrast, sentences that lack conflict, but were equally as difficult to process, did not elicit this same effect. Lastly, I will also show that linear classifiers can successfully decode offline interpretation from EEG activity during sentence presentation.
April 24
Speaker: Kimele Persaud
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Rutgers University - Newark
Theories dating back as early as the 1930s suggest that the retrieval of information from memory is a reconstructive process. That is, past experiences can provide a means to “fill in” partially stored information later. Yet, it is not fully understood how we integrate our prior knowledge with incomplete episodic information during reconstructive memory, what this integration processes looks like across developmental groups, and what happens when our prior knowledge is inconsistent with to be reconstructed information. In this talk, I will discuss several lines of research that employ computational models to understand how the mind adopts the sophisticated process of using prior knowledge to compensate for noisy and incomplete memories, how this process changes across development, and how the integration is influenced by congruency between prior knowledge and newly acquired information.
May 1
Speaker: Lilia Rissman
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychology, Rochester Institute of Technology
TBA