Current 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