January 23: Keir Moulton, Department of Linguistics, SFU

Bound Variable Pronouns: Syntax, semantics, processing

Linguists who study syntax and semantics ask how form and meaning are related. Psycholinguists ask how language users perform the task of matching form and meaning effortlessly and subconsciously. In this respect, pronouns provide a particular challenge, since they can be ambiguous. Pronouns can refer to a constant individual in a discourse, as in (1a) where the pronoun it refers to its antecedent the puppy. The pronoun in (1b) demonstrates another use of pronouns, a ‘bound variable pronoun.’ Here the interpretation of the pronoun co-varies with each puppy; it is said to be ‘bound’ by its antecedent, the quantifier expression every puppy.

(1) a. The puppy loves its owner. non-variable pronoun
b. Every puppy loves its owner. bound variable pronoun

As in formal logic, natural language quantifiers must take scope over the pronouns they bind. There is currently a debate, however, whether bound variable pronouns are subject to an additional syntactic constraint. One view holds that the quantifier and the pronoun it binds must stand in a particular structural relation (Reinhart 1983, Chomsky 1981). A contrasting view argues that only the semantic requirement of scope governs bound variable interpretations (Barker 2012).
In this talk I will discuss instances of bound variable pronouns that shed light on this issue, so-called backward bound variable pronouns, where the bound variable precedes the quantifier that binds it:
(2) a. His mother made every kid a sandwich.
b. Her teacher gave every girl the creeps.

I will discuss the syntax of these constructions, and how they can be modeled in a formal semantics (Montague,17974, Heim and Kratzer 1998) making use of event semantics (Davidson 1967, Elbourne 2005). I will then discuss several on-going studies here in the XSyn lab at SFU that examines the issue from a psycholinguistic perspective.

More about Assistant Professor, Keir Moulton at SFU

February 6: Mark Blair, Cognitive Science Program and Dept. of Psychology

Real-time strategy video games; a new ‘drosophila’ for the cognitive sciences

Dr. Blair will be talking about his current research explores expertise in the context of real-time strategy (RTS) games. RTS games are an ideal domain to study expertise for several reasons.

First, they are a domain of legitimate expertise. Professional players train full time, practicing 6-9 hours a day and typically have played RTS games for over a decade. Top players can earn $250 000 (US) annually. Tournaments are televised live and professional teams are sponsored by major corporations. Second, the game itself requires a rich set of perceptual, attentional, motor, and decision-making skills, and thus offer many opportunities for insights. Third, each game produces an enormous amount of behavioral data: an average game of chess, for instance consists of 40 moves per player, while the average RTS game in our study consists of 1635 moves per player. Finally, by studying a domain in which expert performance is entirely computer-based we can obtain accurate measurements of cognitive-motor performance within the domain of expertise itself, without any possibility of interfering with the activity. Furthermore, we can do so efficiently using in-house techniques, allowing us to collect large, diverse samples regardless of the location of participants.

Dr. Blair will discuss the findings of his team’s first study, which is the largest expertise study ever conducted, as well as the limitations and vast potential of this approach.

Mark Blair is Associate Professor in the Cognitive Science Program, home department, Psychology. He leads his research team in the Cognitive Science Lab looking at how selective attention, the ability to pay attention to important features and ignore irrelevant ones, supports categorization, and interacts with our memory and perceptual systems.

Watch the video of Mark's talk.

More about Mark Blair at SFU. Go to skillcraft.ca for more about the study underway.

February 27: Zita McRobbie-Utasi, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University

Systems with ternary length contrast: A linguistic and cognitive puzzle

Our linguistic and cognitive ability to acquire and accommodate ternary length systems has long been recognized. However, the infrequent occurrence of such systems as well as their evident instability has not as yet been sufficiently accounted for. Why are three-way length contrasts so few in number and why do they appear to be transitory? Based on cross-linguistic studies it has been acknowledged that languages with this type of contrastive system (all known such systems having resulted from strikingly similar historical developments) undergo significant changes in their prosody in the direction of re-establishing binary length distinctions.

Language change in progress as observed in two languages – Estonian and Skolt Saami -- illustrates two possible ways to arrive at a binary system. Although the present status of these languages (Estonian is spoken over a million people while Skolt Saami is severely endangered) may be responsible for the differing venues of language change, it does not provide an answer to the linguistic and cognitive puzzle. However, it does shed light to the process of restoring a binary system via development from the three-way length contrast into a more complex ternary quantity contrast (i.e., in addition to duration, at least one more prosodic factor needs to be considered). It has to be emphasized, though, that despite our ability to handle three-way distinctions, ternary quantity contrasts appear to be just as unstable as ternary length contrasts. Presenting the Estonian and the Skolt Saami case may help to explore further this intriguing linguistic phenomenon.

More about Zita McRobbie-Utasi

March 20: Chung-hye Han, Department of Linguistics, SFU

Experimental Syntax: Resumptive Relative Clauses in English

Dependencies between syntactic items, such as a verb and its displaced arguments, are subject to locality conditions. In particular, these dependencies cannot take place across 'islands'. Such a syntactic dependency is found in relative clauses. In English, a relative clause has a gap which is associated with the head noun, as illustrated in (1), where the gap in the object position of 'sued' is associated with the head noun 'reporter'. The relative clause in (2) is unacceptable, as a gap is placed within a because-clause, which is an island.

(1)   a reporter [who the senator sued __]
(2) * a reporter [who the editor was angry [because the senator sued __]]

This island constraint is quintessential evidence that the structure of natural language is computationally constrained. However, in theoretical syntax and corpus studies, inserting a resumptive pronoun in place of the gap is said to 'rescue' island violating relative clauses, improving their acceptability. So, (3) is believed to be much more acceptable than (2).

(3) ? a reporter [who the editor was angry [because the senator sued him]]

Does the addition of a resumptive pronoun change the structural analysis of island-violating relative clauses making them grammatical, or does it make them simply easier to process?

In this talk, I present a series of experimental studies conducted in the SFU Experimental Syntax (Xsyn) Lab  on the putative rescuing effect of resumption on English relative clauses. In Likert Scale and Magnitude Estimation Task experiments, we found that native speakers of English do not judge island-violating relative clauses with resumptive pronouns more acceptable than the ones with gaps. In a self-paced reading study, however, we found that resumption facilitates reading time. These results taken together suggest that the source of rescuing effect of resumption is processing, not structural.

Chung-hye Han is Associate Professor of Linguistics, and co-directs the Experimental Syntax (Xsyn) Lab.

More about Chung-hye Han at SFU

April 3: Joan Sereno, Linguistics, University of Kansas

Form and Meaning Regularities in Language

It has long been claimed that the relation between form and meaning is arbitrary. In this talk, I will focus first on one of the most basic linguistic distinctions, that between nouns and verbs, and present data that suggest that the relation between sound and grammatical class is predictable rather than arbitrary. I will also present some other fundamental processing differences between English nouns and verbs, including prosodic and morphological differences. A final study will examine speaker and listener interactions (speaker gender and grammatical gender) in Spanish, showing that the acoustic features associated with the sex of a speaker influence the speed and accuracy of making a linguistic decision about the grammatical gender of a word. Taken together, these data raise questions regarding the assumption of arbitrariness in language and its concomitant effects on processing as well as the independence of linguistic and cognitive processes.

Joan Sereno is a lead researcher with the University of Kansas Phonetics and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (KUPPL) provides an integrated environment for the experimental study of speech and language, including its production, perception, and acquisition. Primary research areas are acoustic and auditory phonetics as well as spoken and written word recognition, all across a variety of languages.

More about Professor, Joan Sereno at Kansas

Cogs friends, faculty and students,

Our 2012 Defining Cognitive Science talk series resumes on Wednesday, February 8th.

Invited speakers share their cognitive science related research in 1/2 hour talks followed by discussion.  Get to know more about CogSci research being done at SFU and beyond.  Meet your instructors/fellow researchers/colleagues.Plan to attend on the dates below, Wednesdays at 3:30 in the IRMACS theatre, Rm 10900.

Feb 8: Tim Racine (Department of Psychology, SFU) Joint Attention in Human Infants and Nonhuman Primates: What Does It Mean?

It has proven difficult to find unanimous or unambiguous answers to the question of whether human infants or nonhuman primates understand attention and intentions. It is common for psychologists to cast debates about these issues in terms of rich and lean interpretations of joint attentional behaviours, such as pointing gestures. Rich views defend the attribution of concepts such as ‘shared intentionality’ to 12-month- old human infants, but deny their application to nonhuman primates. Lean views explain pointing with basic learning mechanisms, and often claim considerable continuity across species. I attempt to demonstrate that the main reason this debate continues is that rich and lean theorists pay insufficient attention to definitional issues, thereby obscuring the grounds for the attribution of the concepts in question. I then argue that the rich-lean debate is based on a misconception concerning the relation between mind and behaviour. I conclude with some reflections on the difficulty of attributing an understanding of psychological concepts like attention or intention to non-linguistic or prelinguistic agents.

 

Tim Racine is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at SFU. His research interests include social cognition, evolutionary theory and the philosophy of psychology. For more on his research program see: http://www.sfu.ca/psyc/faculty/ racine/.

Feb 22: Phil Winne (Faculty of Education, Canada Research Chair, SFUShould We Expect Experiments to Advance Cognitive Science? Four Criticisms and a Proposal

Inferences about how individuals behave that are grounded in randomized controlled (true) experiments are very much weaker than commonly believed. First, the confidence interval of a sample statistic is significantly underestimated. Second, a critical assumption underlying linear models of scores in inferential statistical analyses is often invalid. Together, these factors reduce statistical power and muddle the construct validity of putative causes and effects. Third, generalizations of findings from experiments are inherently very fragile. Fourth, generalizing experimental findings to an individual commits a logical error. Corrections to these mistakes are, respectively: know the population from which samples are drawn; gather data that more closely trace causes, then form populations post hoc; and, replace research grounded in attempts to randomly sample participants from populations and inferentially analyzing data statistically with research that gathers densely sampled longitudinal data about individuals and compares them to peers with known qualities.

 

Phil Winne is Professor of Education and Canada Research Chair in Self-Regulated Learning and Learning Technologies at SFU. He theorizes about and researches how learners study, especially how they monitor and adapt methods for learning. He leads a team (apparently perpetually) developing software to gather and analyze data about these phenomena, and (hopefully) that will help learners explore and improve how and what they learn.

 

March 7: Fred Popowich (School for Computing, SFU)Smart Homes Project

With the increase in the number of sensors and automation devices installed in the home, the amount and type of data that can be collected is increasing rapidly. What patterns can be found in this data? What human behaviours can be inferred? What appropriate actions can a "smart home" then take?  And what does it mean for a home to be "smart"?

We will take a look at these questions in the context of a research project involving Embedded Automation Inc and SFU graduate students Stephen Makonin and David Lindberg. The project has allowed us to not only monitor a wide range of appliance data collected from a real home, but also apply different algorithms to this data to identify human activities, and then model the outcomes when proposing different actions taken by a "smart home" to decrease power consumption.

 

Fred Popowich is a Professor in the School of Computing Science at SFU. He is the Director of the newly created Vancouver Institute for Visual Analytics, a joint initiative of Simon Fraser University and the University of British Columbia. He is an Associate Member of the Department of Linguistics, and an Associate Member (and past director) of the Cognitive Science Program. Fred’s PhD in Cognitive Science is from the University of Edinburgh. 

March 21: Paul Smolensky (Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science, Johns Hopkins University)Integrating Connectionist and Symbolic Computation in Grammatical Theory

I will present a general cognitive architecture which formalizes computational relations between the mind and the brain. Principles of neural computation yield an emergent property that constitutes a new principle of mental organization: mental processes compute representations that are optimal. Representations in a given cognitive component are optimal with respect to ‘soft’ constraints that characterize the world as cognized in that component. In addition to optimization, neural computation provides another key process: quantization. This process yields a fundamental property of higher cognition: mental representations are discrete, combinatorial structures. The architecture is illustrated in a domain particularly challenging for mental/neural integration: grammar.

 

Paul Smolensky is Krieger-Eisenhower Professor of Cognitive Science at Johns Hopkins University. After receiving his doctorate in Mathematical Physics at Indiana University in 1981, he was a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognitive Science Lab of the University of California -- San Diego, where he was a founding member of the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) Research Group. Beginning in 1985, he was a member of the faculty of the Computer Science Department at the University of Colorado at Boulder, where he developed neural network models of symbolic computation and the grammatical frameworks of Harmonic Grammar (with Géraldine Legendre and Yoshiro Miyata) and Optimality Theory (with Alan Prince). In 1994 he moved to the Cognitive Science Department at Johns Hopkins, where he continues his work integrating formal linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neural network computation, and has helped build a unique program training Ph.D.s who are theoretically-oriented interdisciplinary cognitive scientists.

Look forward to seeing you there. 

October 5th - Linda T. Kaastra, Visiting scientist, Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre (MAGIC), University of British Columbia

Annotation and the Coordination of Cognitive Processes in Western Art Music Performance

Watch the video of Linda's talk.

My research has focused primarily on coordination in ensemble performance. Coordination can be studied at different levels, all of which can be shown to influence the activity of making music. Social coordination is what brings musicians into the same space to learn and perform a work. The performers coordinate performance activity based on context, audience expectation, and schools of performance. Coordination over time is the process of rehearsing a work within the ensemble. This includes the study of the role that specific keys for coordination (e.g. annotation, clapping/tapping/singing) play in the rehearsal process. Real-time coordination is the study of how performers “make visible” the aspects of their intentions that are useful for coordinating ensemble. This can include measurements of body motion, facial expression, breath, and expressive sound. Finally, coordination can also be studied within in the person-instrument system. For example, how musical experiences are cultivated, how musical meaning is made, how performers think with and through their instruments, and so on. This talk will focus a recent study that examines the use of annotations as keys for coordination in the preparation and performance of Takemitsu’s Masque for Two Flutes. 

Check out the research of Dr. Kaastra.

Linda Kaastra is a visiting scientist at the Media and Graphics Interdisciplinary Centre at the University of British Columbia. Her research focuses on the cognitive science of human interaction in novel environments with a special interest in music performance.  In 2012 she well be a visiting scholar at the UCSD Cognitive Science Department.

October 19th - Veronica Zammitto, Game User Researcher at Electronic Arts

User Experience in Video Games

Watch the video of Veronica's talk.

Game user research (GUR) encompasses an array of methods for assessing players’ experience in order to improve the design of video games. During the last several years, the body of knowledge in GUR has increased significantly in both academia and industry,
incorporating newer techniques in the field.

In this talk, I’ll present a mixed method approach for collecting cognitive, emotional, and behavioural data from gamers during playing sessions. I will describe different techniques, emphasizing strengths and limitations, supported with examples of usability done at EA Sports.

Attendees will gain knowledge of current UX practices in the game industry and practical tips about how to perform it.

Visit Veronica Zammitto's website.

Veronica Zammitto is a Game User Researcher at Electronic Arts Canada. Her background is rooted in psychology, HCI, and game studies which ideally positions her to understand game user experience. She holds a Master in Interactive Arts and Technology and is pursuing a PhD at SFU. Veronica’s main research interest is latest technologies for game user experience. She looks to better understand players’ reactions, and to provide feedback to game developers with actionable data to ensure informed decision during the game development process.

October 26th - Kathleen Slaney, Department of Psychology, Simon Fraser University

On the ambiguity of concept use in Psychology: Is the concept 'concept' a useful concept?

Watch the video of Kate's talk.

We provide a historical and philosophical review of the main theories of concepts that implicitly or explicitly ground the various senses of the concept ‘concept’ in psychology and related sciences, highlighting their respective strengths and limitations. We then consider these theories in terms of their ontology (i.e., their view of the nature/meaning of ‘concept’) and epistemology (i.e., their view of how concepts are acquired by individuals). This is followed by a brief summary of more current treatments and conceptualizations of concepts within psychology that seem linked, at least to some extent, by a general “received view” of sorts, according to which concepts are in some way “in the head.” We contrast this received view with a linguistic construal of concepts, according to which concepts are inextricably bound up with the terms in which they are expressed. We conclude with a consideration of the implications of the foregoing for concept research in psychology by conducting an ordinary language analysis of the concept ‘concept.’

Visit Dr. Slaney's website.

Kathleen Slaney is Associate Professor of Psychology.  Her research interests are philosophy of psychological science, analysis and critique of empirical methodologies, study of scientific practices in psychology, history/philosophy of psychological measurement, and theoretical and applied psychometrics.

November 16th - Liane Gabora, Department of Psychology, University of British Columbia

Honing Theory: A complex systems inspired view of creativity

Watch the video of Liane's Talk.

It is widely assumed that creative thought involves selecting from amongst a set of well-formed, predefined candidate ideas. I will introduce an alternative, referred to as the ‘honing theory of creativity’, according to which: (1) Creative individuals wrestle with issues or ideas that are, for them, ill-defined, or in a state of potentiality, which become well-defined in the process of considering them from different perspectives, or contexts, and (2) Creative outputs are the external manifestation of the process by which an individual¹s internal model of the world, or worldview, self-organizes into a more stable structure. Just as a body heals itself when wounded, elements of a body of knowledge¹ modify each other to solve problems, reduce dissonance, or accommodate unexpected events. Like other complex systems, a worldview self-organizes into a critical state between order and chaos in which a small perturbation occasionally exerts a disproportionately large effect, a phenomenon known as self-organized criticality (SOC). Most thoughts have little effect on the worldview, but the occasional thought triggers another, which triggers an avalanche¹ of conceptual changes, resulting in massive restructuring of knowledge. To model this kind of massive conceptual restructuring, it is necessary to begin with a theory of concepts that incorporates their contextuality and noncompositionality. I will present converging evidence for the honing theory of creativity from neuroscience, studies of analogy formation and creative style, and a mathematical theory of concepts that incorporates how they shift under different contexts, and combine to give new concepts with emergent properties.

Visit Dr. Gabora's website.

The overarching goal of my research is to develop a coherent theory of the process by which culture evolves. I aim to bring forward a theoretical framework for cultural evolution that is as sound as our theoretical framework for biological evolution, and apply it to the tasks of reconstructing our past, exploring possible futures, and furthering human wellbeing. A major component of this interdisciplinary enterprise involves explicating the mechanisms underlying creativity and how the complexity and creativity of the human mind came about. The methods used by my students and I to gain insight into cultural evolution and the creative process include mathematical and computational modelling, as well as human experiments.

November 23rd - 3:30pm - Karon MacLean, Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia

Affective communication through touch

Watch the video of Karon's Talk.

Generally, I’m interested in how people communicate through the sense of touch, and how haptic information transfer interacts with perception in other modalities. We’ve recently been studying two very different kinds of haptic communication. One is abstract information, delivered one-way to your hand, encoded in complex vibrations or in non-consciously perceived rhythms that guide motion. We've found that humans are better at this, depending on how the sensations are created, than you might expect. And the medium has potential for low-effort, background communication. In the second kind, which I'll focus on in this talk, we're examining haptically communicated affect: what's behind “feels” that we like or don't like - can this be predicted or quantified? How do we communicate emotion haptically, to people or animals, and is this an essential part of emotional communication more generally? We've built a touch-sensitive, animatronic Creature as an experimental platform which we are using for basic study of emotion and in a therapeutic setting.

Visit Dr. Maclean's website

Karon Maclean is Professor of Computing Science. Her background includes mechatronics, robotics, physiology, and sensory psychophysics. For information about her research, visit the The Sensory Perception and Interaction Research Group.

Karon started out pre-med at Stanford, picked up engineering (to build things) and proceeded to MIT for a Master's and PhD in Mech. This was interleaved with stints as an engineer doing MEMS and anthropomorphic robotics, and later in a Silicon Valley thinktank where she received some much-needed anti-arts deconditioning. At some point she noticed that large complicated robots tended to (a) not work much of the time and (b) require their tenders and eventual users to spend their time glued to a desk which was not where she wanted to be. She therefore developed an interest in small, simple robots that display virtual models to people (now called haptics), can be put anywhere including your pocket, and do not require a supercomputer to model. She has been at UBC Computer Science since 2000 where her group unites robotics with psychology and interaction design with the goal of mass deployment of communicative and calm haptic interaction.

Peter Wall Early Career Scholar (2001); Izzak Walton Killam Memorial Faculty Research Fellowship (2007); Charles A. McDowell Award, 2008. Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Haptics, founding member of several other editorial and advisory boards, co-chair of the IEEE Haptics Symposium in 2010 and 2012.

19 January - Bernhard Riecke, School for Interactive Arts and Technology, Simon Fraser University

Moving Through Computer-Simulated Environments Without Really Moving?

Virtual reality software and hardware is becoming increasingly affordable and powerful, and is increasingly being used in experimental research. In fact, the possibility to conduct tightly controlled and repeatable experiments with naturalistic multi-modal stimuli in a closed action-perception loop suggest that VR could become a powerful yet flexible research tool. Despite increasing computational power and rendering quality, though, it is debatable whether humans necessarily perceive and behave similarly in real and virtual environments – which is essential for achieving sufficient real-world transfer of experimental results gained in the lab. What might be missing? What can we learn from this? How might we be able to "cheat intelligently" in VR and, e.g., provide users with a compelling sensation of moving through the simulated environments without the need for full physical locomotion? How far can we get with just visual cues? What benefits do we gain from multi-modal stimuli? These and other questions will be addressed (and some hopefully answered) in this talk.

Visit Dr. Riecke's website at SIAT.

Bernhard Riecke received his PhD in Physics from the Tübingen University in Germany and researched for a decade in the Virtual Reality group of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics in Germany. After a post-doc in Psychology at Vanderbilt University he joined the School of Interactive Arts and Technology (SIAT) at SFU-Surrey in 2008.

February 23 - Maite Taboada, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University

Coherence and Cohesion in Multimodal Documents

I present preliminary results of an ongoing project on the discourse characteristics of multimodal documents. A great deal of work in the last few years has focused on the relationships between text and material presented through other modalities, be it visual, audio, or a combination of the two. Much research has studied whether to use multimodal material or not, where to place it, and what effect captions or other verbal information surrounding such material have on the reader.

Less frequently discussed is the nature of the relationship between graphical material and the text itself. The point of departure for this work is that multimodal documents, just like any other form of discourse, exhibit coherence and cohesion relations. In particular, we are examining coherence relations between text and graphical material (pictures, diagrams, figures and tables), and cohesive ties that establish cross-reference between the two modes.

We study three different genres: newspaper articles (New York Times), magazine articles in a scientific magazine (Communications of the Association for Computing Machinery), and scientific articles (Journal of Computational Linguistics). The corpus consists of about 1,500 pages of material, containing over 700 figures, tables and graphs. We show that figures stand in both presentational and subject matter relations to the text they accompany, and that cross-referencing varies widely across genres, with newspaper articles showing little or no reference to the graphical material, and scientific articles marking the reference to the figure explicitly in the text.

This is joint work with Christopher Habel (University of Hamburg), partly sponsored by an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellowship.

Visit Dr. Taboada's website.

Maite Taboada is Associate Professor of Linguistics. Her research areas are discourse analysis and computational linguistics, and in particular coherence, cohesion and sentiment analysis.

March 9 - Yue Wang, Department of Linguistics, Simon Fraser University

Experiencing pitch and time: speech, non-speech, and music

One long-deliberated question in speech perception is whether it involves language-specific mechanisms or reflects a human innate ability to process general physical properties. Some research findings support the independence of speech and non-speech sound processing, whereas others indicate shared general auditory mechanisms. However, the dynamic interplay between the two processes has not been fully addressed.  This talk presents a series of empirical studies on the perception of linguistic pitch and temporal properties (e.g., lexical tone, pitch accent, vowel duration) by native and non-native language speakers.  We address (1) whether the processing of these linguistic properties differs from that of the corresponding non-speech pitch or temporal information; (2) how native and non-native patterns differ as a function of linguistic experience; (3) whether there is any transfer of learning from non-speech to speech for non-native learners; and (4) whether musical experience facilitates perception and learning of pitch and duration in speech due to the overlap between music and these speech properties in the relevant acoustic features.  Findings of these studies suggest an interrelated network of sensory and cognitive mechanisms employed in linguistic pitch and temporal processing, and how these mechanisms are shaped by different experiences.

Visit Dr. Wang's website.

Yue Wang is Associate Professor of Linguistics.  Her research areas are experimental phonetics, neurolinguistics, and second language speech learning.  Her recent studies include multimodal integration in speech perception, the processing and learning of pitch and timing in speech, and the integration of linguistic, musical, and mathematical processing in native and non-native languages.

March 23 - Luc Beaudoin, Faculty of Education, Simon Fraser University

On developing expert knowledge by reading with technology

In the Society of Mind, Marvin Minsky remarked, "No matter what one's problem is, provided that it's hard enough, one always gains from learning better ways to learn".   An expert in a changing discipline is normally someone who continues to learn, and perhaps who continues to learn how to learn.  What can we glean from cognitive science (and philosophy of science) to assist even experts in their quest to become more productive knowledge builders? I will present some of the factual and practical aims of a research project on expert reading-to-learn.  I will describe some of the current (sometimes implicit) goals, requirements and challenges of knowledge workers relating to their learning with technology.  I will select and propose some testable principles to help experts (and expertlike workers) develop their expertise through reading. I will emphasize previous findings, their limitations and new practical and factual research questions.

Visit Dr. Beaudoin's Cognitive Productivity Research Project

Luc P. Beaudoin is Adjunct Professor of Education. His Cognitive Productivity Research Project focuses on adult learning with technology and adult memory performance. He led the software development team of the Learning Kit project at SFU; he was an at founding member of R&D of two Canadian technology startups (Abatis Systems and Tundra Semiconductor). He was Assistant Professor of Military Psychology and Leadership at RMC. He owns and leads CogZest. He has a Ph.D. in Cognitive Science from the University of Birmingham (England).

March 30 - Robert Hadley, School of Computing Science, Simon Fraser University

Binding concepts together: How does the brain do it?

When we understand a sentence, such as “The green frog swam under a brown leaf ”, specic concepts are activated within our minds (and, some would argue, within our brains). In understanding that sentence, we realize that ‘green’ is being applied to ‘frog’ and ‘brown’ is applied to ‘leaf ’, rather than vice-versa. Many researchers in the field of Connectionism would describe this phenomenon as just one instance of many possible forms of “binding”. In the present case, the concepts of ‘green’ and ‘frog’ are temporarily bound together, and likewise for ‘brown’ and ‘leaf ’. Perceptual features can likewise be temporarily bound together.

A long-standing issue within Connectionist research has concerned the manner in which the human brain contrives to bind concepts to concepts, values to variables, fillers toroles, and sensory features to features. This talk examines the comparative merits of two binding methods whose biological foundations have been empirically confirmed, namely, binding via synchronous firing and binding via conjunctive coding. Within thecommunity of connectionist researchers, it is often asserted that synchronous binding is far more efficient, in terms of the number of neurons required, than conjunctive coding. Moreover, Singer (1999) has argued that conjunctive coding is inadequate for other cognitively based reasons.

My talk will explain the nature of these prominent binding methods, and argue that the above-cited complaints against conjunctive binding are far from decisive. I argue further that synchronous firing is a surface phenomenon – one which requires an explanation in terms of underlying causes. I will suggest a model which illustrates one way in which synchronous bindings could be engendered by a substratum that relies, ultimately, upon conjunctive binding nodes. While the details of the approach are not taken to be biologically realistic, the model illustrates, analogically, how the brain might provide a conjunctive substratum that would only require a feasibly small number ofconjunctive neurons.

Visit Dr. Hadley's website

Robert F. Hadley is Professor of Computing Science. His research areasinclude cognition, connectionism, and reasoning.