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.
February 8
February 22
Speaker: Eduardo Mercado III
Professor, Department of Psychology, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Abstract concept formation was once thought to be a uniquely human ability. An increasing variety of species have shown this ability, however. What determines when an individual will focus on general patterns rather than the particulars of specific events? Does the formation of abstract concepts really require greater cognitive sophistication than other types of associative learning? Recent studies of dogs’ abilities to acquire a repeating concept and a same-different concept suggest that flexible use of abstract concepts may depend on repeated experiences and attentional flexibility.
March 1
Speaker: Kenny Joseph
Assistant Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University at Buffalo, SUNY
Computational social scientists have expended a considerable amount of effort in recent years to use models based on distributional semantics (most popularly, word embedding models like BERT and word2vec) to capture the meanings of the words and phrases used to describe people. Existing work tends to focus on evaluating measurements for particular phrases on particular dimensions of meaning (e.g. "how can we measure gender stereotypes of occupational identities?"). But phrases about people exist within a broader, more complex, and less well understood space of meanings. These analyses thus risk biases in what they are measuring, how they are measuring it, and what claims they make based on those findings. In this talk, I will try to convince you that to address these issues, a new measure of semantic similarity, which I call person-centric similarity, is necessary. In the talk, I will introduce person-centric similarity, why it is necessary, and our current empirical and theoretical work underlying it.
March 15
Speaker: Kristina Deroy Milvae
Assistant Professor, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo, SUNY
April 5
Speaker: Tara Deemyad
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Otolaryngology, Johns Hopkins University
April 19
Speaker: Matthew Wisniewski
Assistant Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, Kansas State University