2025 Events

Late in his career, Daniel Dennett changed his mind about minds in a way that deserves careful attention. In "Brains Made of Brains" (2017), Dennett expresses regret about aspects of his earlier "homuncular functionalism" program, which explained cognitive tasks by decomposing them into simpler sub-tasks performed by less sophisticated homunculi. While maintaining his functionalism, Dennett now suggests that genuine minds require a different kind of architecture: one built from parts that themselves have simpler forms of caring and agency. This paper examines and develops this "desire homuncularism" view, which holds both that genuine minds require genuine caring, and that such caring requires parts with simpler cares. I argue that this view helps explain persistent intuitions about which systems have minds, and has significant implications for both AI sentience and existential risk from AI. Drawing on work by Terrence Deacon, I develop two key arguments for desire homuncularism: First, systems with distributed caring exhibit deeper integration, as evidenced by how changes to their parts affect their overall goals. Second, such systems achieve a richer form of conative reference - their goals are more firmly grounded in the world and harder to "spoof." These considerations suggest modern AI systems, despite their impressive capabilities, may be what Keith Frankish calls "cognitively rich but conatively bankrupt." While they can process information in remarkably sophisticated ways, they lack the kind of distributed, bottom-up caring that characterizes genuine minds. This analysis points to a possible path forward in AI development: we may be able to create highly capable AI systems that neither warrant significant moral concern (due to lack of genuine caring) nor pose existential risks (due to lack of genuine agency). While speculative, this view suggests that the old science fiction dream of helpful but largely "mindless" robots may be achievable after all.

Cognitive Work Analysis (CWA) is a conceptual framework that allows for analysis of all factors that affect human-system interactions. The products of this system of analyses can be directly transformed into design requirements for information systems. CWA is an inherently holistic approach that simultaneously examines the environmental, organizational, and social activities, as well as individual dimensions. CWA consists of six stages, which focus on the reasons that a worker may prefer one cognitive strategy over another or may transition between strategies during execution of a cognitive process, and identifies the skills-, rules, or knowledge (SRK) modes of cognition. The designer may choose to encourage and induce one cognitive mode over another as dictated by the situation (e.g., in an emergency response, skill-based performance is preferred). This presentation reviews the genesis and theoretical underpinnings of CWA and the specific challenges in its use and implementation, pointing to still open research questions.

A variety of skills and cognitive abilities developing in early childhood provide a foundation for children’s mathematical thinking and learning once they enter formal schooling. It is imperative to identify these predictive skills and discover how to best measure them and support their development through targeted and differentiated instruction, especially for children who may experience difficulties in math learning due to contextual factors or learning disability. In this talk, I discuss and provide research examples of applying theories of mathematical cognition to applied research on measurement, instruction, and intervention in early childhood mathematics.

Humans have unique modes of interacting with the flow of time which forms a foundation for music and many skilled motor acts. One mode, called meter-based perception, involves the rhythmic quantization of time according to an origin and a time-scale. We have hypothesized that this type of perception relies on covert activity in the motor system. We will present data supporting one hypothesis, the Action Simulation for Auditory Perception (ASAP) hypothesis, showing the interaction of motor and auditory systems during rhythm perception. We will also discuss recent work to understand the neural foundations of complex motor skill by using mobile brain/body imaging methods to study a three-ball juggling in normal and simulated reduced gravity.

In this talk, I outline how my systematic pursuit of questions involving the role that logical semantics plays in sentence comprehension has led to strong hypotheses about how other aspects of mind might play a role. Fifteen years ago, I characterized the notion of context purely in terms of properties of the linguistic message. That is, I investigated neural responses to sentences and sentence contexts that could be best described using structural vs. conceptual features. More recent investigations in my lab have broadened the notion of ‘context’ to include the emotional affect of the perceiver of the sentence, as well as the social cue of facial eye-gaze – together with race – of the producer of the sentence. Augmenting the notion of context allows for a theory that can account for individual differences in sentence comprehension, strengthening theories of cognitive neuroscience of language overall.

TBA

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.

Music is shaped by both biological and cultural factors, but the extent of each influence is not fully understood. This is in part due to recruitment bias, since studies tend to rely on English-speaking or student participants. Additionally, existing behavioral techniques are frequently unsuited for cross-cultural research and lack the capability to capture rich and complex perceptual spaces. In this talk, I will discuss my work in addressing these limitations. First, I will describe a project investigating rhythm representations in 39 groups from 15 countries. We found that all groups showed categorical rhythm perception at simple integer ratios, but the presence and strength of these categories varied across locations in ways that reflected local musical structure. Second, I will discuss work on melody and pitch, showing that octave equivalence—often assumed to be universal—is in fact culturally contingent. I will then present evidence for cross-cultural similarities in the use of simple melodic cells by both children and adults. Finally, I will introduce a new line of research on musical emotion across cultures, enabled by our global data-collection platform PsyNet (www.psynet.dev), which extends participant recruitment beyond standard platforms such as Prolific or Qualtrics. Taken together, these findings highlight the need to reconsider which musical building blocks are truly universal and which are culturally specific.