Current Events

TBA

Societal hierarchies between groups are prevalent and deeply impactful. In this talk, I will present evidence that children begin learning about, representing, and participating in societal hierarchies starting early in life. I will first discuss abstract mechanisms through which children initially build representations of social group hierarchies, with a focus on children’s learning from patterns in others’ social choices. Next, I will show that real-world patterns of who tends to be chosen for leadership roles become reflected in children’s early gendered and race-based thinking about whom leadership is ‘for.’ From there, I will discuss how children become involved in the hierarchies they learn about, providing evidence for early variation in children’s leadership preferences and emerging sociopolitical views. I will conclude with future directions exploring how children’s local contexts and specific lived experiences shape their thinking about—and responses to—societal hierarchies and inequities between groups.

Our brains evolved to process complex, meaningful stimuli that arrive at our senses in a continuous manner, not lists of pictures and words like those commonly used in memory experiments. Most of what we know about the cognitive neuroscience of aging has relied on these tightly controlled but highly artificial stimuli. Recent work from our lab and others has started to use naturalistic stimuli (such as movies and stories) to examine age differences in neurocognitive functioning under conditions that more closely mimic everyday life. In this talk, I will present recent work from our lab showing that older adults may blur across successive events in memory, due to their lessened ability to inhibit previously attended information. At a neural level, we have shown that this relates to longer neural states during movie watching. Finally, I will discuss a novel intervention we have been developing aimed at making events more distinct and improving memory in older adults. I argue that some of these insights would not have been possible with classic list-based approaches to memory.

Misinformation is nothing new. For as long as humans have communicated, they also manipulated information and deceived others to gain power. Nevertheless, scholars, journalists and pundits have expressed a concern about humanity entering a new “Post-Truth” era, one driven by the collapse of truth and political turmoil. In this talk, Dr. Ophir argues that humans have never been motivated by accuracy, and that the current moment could be better explained by considering unprecedented technological and political developments. 

Language has been at the core of artificial intelligence since the very beginning of computing. Modeling something as inherently human and complex as language has never been easy, yet today more people than ever interact daily with language technologies. 

What do recent advances in AI tell us about language itself? And what new challenges emerge in this era of rapid technological change? In this talk, I will present part of my research in computational linguistics, covering topics such as linguistic diversity in NLP, quantitative approaches to language, and the use of large language models for linguistic analysis.

Access to auditory-phonetic information is fundamental for learning spoken language. Children with prelingual, profound hearing loss who receive cochlear implants (CIs) do not receive robust auditory input for spoken language until their implants are switched on, which typically does not happen until they are 12 months of age or older. In addition, the auditory input that children with CIs receive is an electrical, not acoustic, signal. Given this early auditory deprivation and the qualitatively different nature of the input, what can be done to facilitate language development in children with CIs?

This talk presents a series of studies examining how early vocabulary composition predicts later grammatical outcomes in children with CIs. Across studies, children’s verb lexicon size and diversity, but not their noun lexicon size or diversity, significantly predicted grammatical outcomes 12 months later. In addition, children’s use of gestures—such as pretending to feed with a bottle—predicted subsequent verb lexicon size. Taken together, these findings outline a potential sequence of developmental steps that can help maximize grammatical outcomes in children with CIs.

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