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.

Spring 2019 Events

Relatively speaking: spatial discrimination tasks as tools for studying multisensory integration

February 27
Speaker: Ross Maddox
Assistant Professor, Departments of Biomedical Engineering and Neuroscience, University of Rochester

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Both the visual and auditory systems provide spatial information. Because many objects can be both seen and heard, the brain combines information from each sensory modality to form a single estimate of an object’s location. When there is conflict between the cues from a single object, those cues are weighed by their reliability, which usually results in a visually-driven bias of auditory localization, namely the “ventriloquist effect.” Numerous studies of crossmodal integration have described the phenomenon behaviorally, modeled it, and explored its neural underpinnings. The overwhelming majority of these studies have used absolute localization tasks, for which localization bias is the principal outcome, rather than discrimination tasks (i.e., relative localization), which measure spatial acuity. Studies from our lab suggest this represents a missed opportunity. We have used spatial discrimination to show effects of eye gaze on auditory spatial coding unrevealed by absolute localization tasks. We have also used discrimination in tasks where auditory and visual stimuli are collocated, so no localization bias is expected. Finally, our preliminary results suggest that spatial discrimination tasks reveal abnormal auditory spatial processing in people with hemianopia (one-sided blindness due to a visual cortical lesion), where studies of auditory localization have suggested normal processing. Taken together, these findings demonstrate the benefits of diversity in experimental design.

On the Acquisition of number concepts: A new puzzle

March 13
Speaker: Richard Samuels
Professor, Department of Philosophy, Ohio State University

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In this talk, we sketch a new puzzle arising from an apparent tension in number concept acquisition and the meanings of number expressions, which we call ‘The Acquisition Puzzle’. It runs roughly as follows. It is widely accepted among developmental psychologists that children acquire cardinality concepts, i.e. the sorts of concepts employed when counting, well before acquiring basic arithmetic concepts, i.e. the sorts of concepts employed when doing basic arithmetic. On the other hand, it is widely accepted by semanticists that the meanings of number expressions employed in cardinality statements at least implicitly reference numbers, and that numbers are the sorts of things referenced by numerals in basic arithmetic statements. This seems to suggest that acquiring cardinality concepts requires prior possession of arithmetic concepts, just as e.g. acquiring the concept BACHELOR seemingly requires prior possession of the concept MALE. Thus, the Puzzle is this: How can children acquire cardinality concepts before basic arithmetic concepts if possessing the former presupposes prior possession of the latter? The purpose of the talk is to motivate the assumptions underlying The Acquisition Puzzle, as well as to consider certain seemingly plausible ways out. These include adopting (i) a non-referential semantics for numerals, (ii) a referential semantics for numerals according to which numbers are derived (via type-shifting) from the meanings of cardinals, (iii) nativism with respect to the Dedekind-Peano Axioms or the Approximate Number System, or (iv) a certain structuralist-inspired account on which children acquire both cardinality and basic arithmetic concepts via abstraction on the basis of “intransitive counting” (reciting the numerals in their usual order). Ultimately, though we would like option (iv) to work, none of these is without significant challenges.

Improving efficiency at the desktop of the mind: The effects of working memory training on cognitive performance, brain function, and clinical outcomes

April 3
Speaker: Tom Covey
Assistant Professor, Department of Neurology, University at Buffalo

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Working memory is a core cognitive ability that enables the short-term maintenance and manipulation of stimulus information for the purpose of completing task-specific goals. There is evidence that working memory performance can be improved with targeted training, and it is possible that this training may promote benefits in other cognitive domains. To date, studies that have examined the efficacy of working memory training for producing improved performance on untrained tasks (i.e., transfer effects) have yielded mixed findings. Questions also remain regarding the specific neural processes associated with working memory training gains, and regarding the mechanisms that can account for transfer of these gains to other tasks. Here, I will present findings indicating that (1) working memory training enhances neural activity associated with executive control processes, (2) cognitive training that targets selective attention (not engaging memory) can also induce changes in neural activity, but via processes that are distinct from those targeted by working memory training, and (3) the enhancement of neural activity associated with executive control and improvements in cognitive outcomes are observed in patients with Multiple Sclerosis (a neurodegenerative disorder) that undergo working memory training. Neurophysiological indices of brain activity obtained during cognitive tasks will be a primary focus of this talk (EEG, event-related potentials). The implications of these findings and future research directions will be discussed.

Incremental Learning in Deep Neural Networks using Memory Replay

April 24
Speaker: Christopher Kanan
Assistant Professor, Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the Rochester Institute of Technology

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Deep learning has been tremendously successful, especially for solving problems in natural language understanding and computer vision. This is a great achievement, but artificial intelligence (AI) still has a long way to go toward achieving the versatility of humans. After training on large amounts of data, conventional deep neural networks are frozen in time. Unlike humans, they cannot easily continue to learn more information. If this is attempted, then conventional models will suffer from catastrophic forgetting, resulting in the loss of previously acquired skills. In this talk, I review hippocampal replay during sleep in mammals and its hypothesized role in enabling generalization in cortex. I then describe two deep neural network models, developed by my lab, that are inspired by the dual-memory architecture of the mammalian brain. These models use replay mechanisms to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and they achieve state-of-the-art results on both image and audio classification datasets.

Training Perception and Action to Do the Right Thing

May 8
Speaker: Robert Goldstone
Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University

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By one account, formal thought in mathematics and science requires developing deep construals that run counter to perception. This approach draws an opposition between superficial perception and principled understanding. In this talk, I advocate the converse strategy of grounding scientific and mathematical reasoning in perception and action. Relatively sophisticated reasoning is typically achieved not by ignoring perception, but rather by adapting perception and action routines so as to conform with and support formally sanctioned responses. Perception and action are more sophisticated than usually thought, particularly because they can be adapted to do the (cognitive) Right Thing. The first case study for this thesis concerns arithmetic and algebraic reasoning, where we find that mathematical proficiency involves executing spatially explicit transformations to notational elements. People learn to attend mathematical operations in the order in which they should be executed, and the extent to which students employ their perceptual attention in this manner is positively correlated with their mathematical experience. People also produce mathematical notations that they are good at reading. Based on observations like these, we have begun to design, implement, and assess virtual, interactive sandboxes for students to explore algebra. The second case study involves students learning about science by exploring simulations. We have developed a computational model of the process by which human learners discover patterns in natural phenomena. Our approach to modeling how people learn about a system by interacting with it follows three core design principles: 1) perceptual grounding, 2) experimental intervention, and 3) cognitively plausible heuristics for determining relations between simulation elements. In contrast to the majority of existing models of scientific discovery in which inputs are presented as symbolic, often numerically quantified, structured representations, our model takes as input perceptually grounded, spatio-temporal movies of simulated natural phenomena.

Distinguished Speaker Series Talk

Patterns of imitation and innovation in collective behavior

May 9, 3:30pm
Student Center auditorium

Distinguished Speaker: Robert Goldstone
Professor, Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Indiana University

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We have developed internet-enabled experimental platforms to explore group patterns that emerge when people attempt to solve simple problems while taking advantage of the developing solutions of other people in their social network. I will describe imitation and innovation in low-dimensional, spatial environments, and then extend this approach to high-dimensional and more abstract solution spaces. Our human experiments and computer simulations show that there is a systematic relation between the difficulty of a problem search space and the optimal social network for transmitting solutions. People tend to imitate high-scoring solutions, prevalent solutions, solutions that become increasingly prevalent, and solutions similar to one’s own solution. In a real-world extension of this work, we study how parents in the United States name their babies. Using a historical database of the names given to children over the last century in the United States, we find that naming choices are influenced by both the frequency of a name in the general population, and increasingly by its “momentum” in the recent past. More broadly, we consider collective patterns of diversity, problem space coverage, and group performance that arise when people interact – patterns that group members often do not understand or even perceive.

Summer Section

Summer 2019 Short Course
Methods for Analyzing Sound and Modeling Auditory Plasticity (MASMAP)
-- June 5-7, 2019 --

Description

Perceptual processes have been a central focus of computational models of neural and cognitive mechanisms for much of the past century. Often, these models serve to prove the feasibility of proposed mechanisms rather than to simulate actual situations faced by organisms. For instance, models of speech processing may assume that listeners are working with pristine representations of received words rather than natural speech in noisy conditions. One way to increase the ecological validity of perceptual models is to represent actual inputs in biologically plausible ways rather than using idealized inputs. This requires transforming recorded signals into representations that reflect the sensory and perceptual sensitivities of receivers prior to analyzing the patterns within those representations. Providing psychology researchers with the computational skills necessary to implement biologically-based signal transformations in combination with simulations of perceptual processing can move the field closer to realistic theories of perception and cognition.

Application for financial support to attend MASMAP, to be sent along with a CV and letter of support to cperazio@buffalo.edu.

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