Current Events

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 Eduard Mercado III, director of the Center for Cognitive Science.

Fall 2019 Events

Animal Behavioral Models of Hyperacusis

September 18
Speaker: Kelly Radziwon
Research Assistant Professor, Department of Communicative Disorders and Sciences, University at Buffalo

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Hyperacusis is an auditory perceptual disorder in which everyday sounds are perceived as uncomfortably or excruciatingly loud, resulting in abnormally low loudness discomfort levels (LDLs). Although approximately 6 percent of the general population suffers from debilitating hyperacusis, relatively little is known about the biological bases of this loudness intolerance problem largely due to the lack of reliable and valid animal behavioral models. Recently, our lab has developed two behavioral paradigms that can reliably detect hyperacusis rats. One model uses operant conditioning techniques to accurately assess loudness growth in animals while the other model uses a modified place preference apparatus to assess sound avoidance behavior in rats. These animal models provide the basis for further studies examining the physiological and biological correlates of this disorder.

Individual Differences in Phonetic Plasticity: Rate, Accent, and Learning

October 9
Speaker: Christopher Heffner
Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, University of Connecticut

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Speech understanding requires constant adjustment. This can be seen most radically when encountering new speech sound tokens in a second language, where categorizing non-native sounds requires learning. Yet adjustment to phonetic categories can be observed even within a native language, where tolerating variation between talkers in speech rate or in accent requires adaptation. Though non-native and native speech perception share similarities, it is unclear whether they rely on common cognitive resources. In the present study, we explore individual differences in each process in behavior. We focus first on adaptation to speech rate, finding that individual differences can be challenging in the world of rate adaptation. Next, we examine accent adaptation and both explicit learning and incidental learning of phonetic categories. In the end, we find interrelationships in performance on three of our measures of phonetic plasticity: explicit learning, accent adaptation, and rate adaptation. Better learners of non-native tokens in explicit tasks were also better adapters. This suggests that learning and adaptation may depend on shared behavioral plasticity. MRI data analysis indicates that those shared behavioral measures may be supported by areas of the brain largely not associated with language.

Intersection of Data-driven and Physics-based Learning for Robotic Systems

October 23
Speaker: Minghui Zheng
Assistant Professor, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, University at Buffalo

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Robots are usually programmed for repetitive tasks in a structured environment or particular tasks in a less structured environment with a considerable amount of hand-crafted tuning work. Whenever a new robot with different dynamics and a new type of tasks are presented, the well-designed planning and control algorithms for the robot usually have to be re-derived with modification to both hardware and software by researchers to guarantee the required performance, and the actions for the robot to take have to be re-programmed and debugged by engineers. It remains very challenging to directly program a robot to automatically perform new tasks and/or adjust to new dynamics with guaranteed performance in terms of accuracy and robustness to uncertainties. Towards overcoming this limitation, this talk discusses our recent work on a learning framework by reasoning the error from physics, enabling a robot to effectively and efficiently learn from the experiences gathered by other robots. With this learning framework, the robot will learn three skills that are fundamentally critical in performing complex tasks: (1) how to sense and respond to environmental uncertainties, (2) how to generate a dynamically feasible trajectory, and (3) how to collaborate with human. This learning framework stands at the intersection of data-driven and model-based methodologies and is expected to possess promising data utilization efficiency and learning reliability.

The Science of Learning to Engage Diverse students in the Student-centered Learning Environments

October 30
Speaker: Yunjeong Chang
Assistant Professor, Department of Learning and Instruction, University at Buffalo

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Increasing interest in student-centered learning has become evident across grade levels (e.g., K-12, higher education and professional education). Rooted in epistemology that individuals learn from experiences and construct their own learning, socio-constructivist extended the social aspects of student-centered learning, emphasizing others’ roles in helping individuals reach the point of independent functioning. The use of technology has increasingly assumed learners to have individual and group responsibilities for what, how, where, and when to learn. Some researchers have questioned the validity and wisdom of student-centered learning practices. While the reported benefits of individual and group-based experiential learning (e.g., problem-based, case-based, project-based learning) have been established, few studies have empirically investigated the relative benefits across students of mixed abilities and backgrounds. In this talk, I will share my research findings from ongoing studies to equitably engage cognitively and culturally diverse learners in the student-centered collaborative learning environments. Situating in postsecondary level teaching and learning environments with sociocultural and social-cognitive perspectives, I will present how educators design and develop equitably engaging student-centered online/hybrid/face-to-face learning environments with cognitive learning theories.

Chimpanzees cooperate in a competitive world

November 6
Speaker: Malini Suchak
Assistant Professor, Department of Animal Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, Canisius College

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Although observations of cooperation in wild chimpanzees are relatively widespread, a lot of the mechanisms responsible for initiating and maintaining cooperative relationships are unknown. Indeed, some researchers have speculated that rather than truly cooperating, wild chimpanzees may be acting individually in pursuit of a common goal. Captivity provides an ideal setting for investigating these questions; however, many captive studies have failed to find cooperation, or only find it under severely constrained settings when they “engineer” cooperative partnerships. We argue that these constraints limit the natural conflict resolution mechanisms chimpanzees might use to mitigate competition to favor cooperation and further, limited partnerships provide less opportunity to learn about cooperative relationships and choose specific partners. We conducted a series of group-wide cooperation experiments with two groups of captive chimpanzees examining the roles of partner choice, competition, and costly outcomes in initiating and maintaining cooperation. We found that under these complex circumstances the chimpanzees quite readily establish cooperation, develop varying expertise, are sensitive to outcomes and risk in investing in cooperative acts, and use a variety of natural conflict resolution mechanisms to mitigate competition. Chimpanzees appear to quite readily exhibit a number of interesting mechanisms to maintain cooperation, but only if given the chance to express their behavioral repertoire to the fullest possible extent.

Amodal neurolinguistic and cognitive representations: Evidence from prosody and number concepts in ASL signers and English speakers

November 13
Speaker: Marie Coppola
Associate Professor, Department of Psychological Sciences, University of Connecticut

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In the last few decades many studies have demonstrated striking parallels between signed and spoken languages in terms of their grammatical structure, acquisition, processing, and neural underpinnings. This talk focuses on two domains that have not been previously studied in both modalities: prosodic processing and number cognition. The Closure Positive Shift (CPS) is an established ERP component observed in response to processing prosodic phrase boundaries, which signal the internal structure of the message. In spoken languages, the CPS has been elicited by sound-based correlates of prosodic phrasing, such as slower speech before a boundary, or shorter or longer pauses between phrases. Is sound necessary for this type of linguistic processing? Using novel, carefully controlled stimuli in ASL and spoken English, we observed a CPS at comparable phrase boundaries in both Deaf native American Sign Language (ASL) signers and hearing native English speakers. These results challenge the claim that the CPS depends on sound, and suggests similarity in prosodic processing across signed and spoken languages.

The second part of the talk addresses number cognition. Deaf children learning ASL from their Deaf parents from birth show the same developmental trajectory as do hearing children who learn spoken English from their hearing parents from birth (Early Language groups). However, on average, deaf children who begin acquiring ASL or spoken English at some point after birth (Later Language groups) perform more poorly. These findings may in part explain the significant “math gap” long observed between deaf children and their hearing peers.

Thus, the timing of language exposure is important for the development of age-appropriate number concepts, but the modality of language is not. These results, taken together, contribute novel developmental and neurolinguistic evidence to the growing body of knowledge regarding language modality, sensitive periods, and neural plasticity.

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