Cognitive Science Institute
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MINDS
SOCIETIES
PRELIMINARY COGNITIVE SCIENCE INSTITUTE PROGRAM 2008 SUMMER INSTITUTE PROGRAM M o n t r e a l - J u n e 2 7 t h - J u l y 6 t h 2 0 0 8 SPECIAL EVENT
CONFERENCE SPEAKER ABSTRACTS
FRIDAY, JUNE 27TH 19:30 - PUBLIC CONFERENCE Daniel C. DENNETT, Tufts University From Animal to Person: How Culture Makes Up our Minds
SATURDAY, JUNE 28TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - From Culture to Cognition Merlin W. DONALD, Queen's University Culture and the Human Mind This lecture will present a brief review of a particular theory of cognitive and cultural co-evolution. The proposed hominid evolutionary scenario differs from theories that promote cognition over culture, and attribute all early hominid cultural evolution to the emergence of specialized brain “modules” devoted to specific capabilities, such as “theory of mind,” language, or gesture. A co- evolutionary scenario acknowledges the fact that cultural evolution can change the contingencies inherent in the evolutionary environments. The human brain must adapt to these contingencies. In humans, culture forms a “cognitive ecology” that defines many of the selection pressures impinging on the brain, and led to a shift away from the prevalence of built-in modular cognitive abilities (as seen in bird song, for example), and toward highly flexible neural adaptive systems that can adjust to a variety of fast changing conditions in the evolutionary environment. Three stages in this unique hominid evolutionary process will be outlined here.
10:45 Frank C. KEIL, Yale University Navigating the Division of Cognitive Labor All human societies have marked divisions of cognitive labor. To be a successful member in such societies, one must have some sense of how to navigate the terrain of knowledge in other minds, to know who knows what and how to access that information in the most efficient manner. Well before they enter formal schooling, young children have some sense that knowledge is differentially clustered in other minds, thereby creating individuals with different areas of expertise and contrasting patterns of deference. There are several distinct ways to conceive of how knowledge might be clustered in other minds. Young children seem to be sensitive to many of these ways, but may have different default biases from older children and adults in terms of which ones they think are the most fruitful for filling in gaps in their own understanding. Notions of the division of
1 cognitive labor intersect with developing views of credibility, ignorance, testimony and pathways to knowledge.
11:45 Daniel M.T. FESSLER, University of California, Los Angeles Unpacking the Human Capacity for Culture Our species' success in colonizing nearly every ecosystem on the planet is primarily due to our capacity to acquire, use, and further develop information that we acquire from others. Anthropologists have long considered the question of the evolution of what has been termed "the capacity for culture." However, as this phrase suggests, most investigators have emphasized the development of informationally and evolutionarily implausible generalized learning mechanisms. Evolutionary psychologists have achieved considerable success in identifying domain-specific mental mechanisms. However, with only a few exceptions, they have largely overlooked the problem of culture acquisition. This talk explores the emerging perspective that our species' use of culture depends on the workings of an assortment of special-purpose psychological mechanisms that evolved in order to exploit the enormous adaptive potential of socially transmitted information.
14:00 Ara NORENZAYAN, University of British Columbia Religious Cognition In a species with tremendous cultural diversity, the capacity for religion tops the list of species- specific core human universals. Yet religion is likely not an evolutionary adaptation, but a recurring by-product of the complex evolutionary landscape that sets material conditions for ordinary human life. This means that religious cognition is the product of cultural transmission constrained by evolutionary psychology. There is universality of 1) belief in supernatural agents who 2) relieve existential anxieties such as death and deception but 3) demand passionate costly commitment which are 4) validated through emotional ritual. The cognitive and emotional repertoire of religion is discussed along with cross-cultural and experimental evidence to examine the causes and consequences of religious belief.
15:00 Richard W. BYRNE, University of St Andrews, Scotland From Parsing Actions to Understanding Intentions: an Action-interpretation Origin for “ Theory of Mind ”? "Having a theory of mind" is often invoked to explain remarkable abilities in social cognition, but in reality this is little more than a re-description of the data, a challenge for theorists to understand what it really means and how we - and perhaps some other species - evolved those abilities. I shall argue that these abilities may have grown out of an understanding of action, and in particular the key first step was evolution of an ability to parse the skilled actions of others. Parsing the efficient, goal-directed behaviour of a skilled model allows its intention to be "seen" (as the normal result which terminates action), and allows the cause-effect relations in the steps of the process to be "seen" (as the sequence and coordinations of actions necessary for that result to be achieved). In contrast, reasoning about true intentionality and true causality may depend on possession of language, and be of relatively minor usefulness in everyday interactions.
16:15 Richard C. CONNOR, University of Massachusetts Dartmouth
2 Sociality in Dolphins Indian Ocean Bottlenose dolphins (Tursiops aduncus) in Shark Bay, Australia, live in a very large, unbounded society with a fission-fusion grouping pattern. Adult male dolphins in Shark Bay participate in 2-3 levels of shifting alliances. A male navigating the nested alliance system in Shark Bay may have to consider the impact of behavioral decisions on each alliance level. Males mediate alliance relationships with gentle contact behaviors such as petting but synchrony also plays an important role in affiliative interactions. Potential cognitive demands a Shark Bay dolphin include the need to develop social strategies involving the recognition of a large number of individuals, and their relationships with others, but with unavoidable uncertainty about some of those relations.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - From Culture to Cognition Luc FAUCHER, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
SUNDAY, JUNE 29TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Theories of Mind Rebecca SAXE, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Social Cognitive Neuroscience Laboratory Theories of Mind Abstract will be added shortly.
10:45 Michael SIEGAL, The University of Sheffield Theory of Mind and Language This presentation concerns the role of language and conversational understanding as determinants of performance on tasks that have been used to measure ToM reasoning. There will be a discussion of recent evidence from normal children, children with visual and auditory impairments, and children with autism and cerebral palsy, as well as persons with aphasia. This research serves to illuminate the contribution of various facets of language (syntax, semantics, and pragmatics) to proficient ToM reasoning. To some considerable extent, evidence now shows that ToM is independent of syntax and other aspects of language acquisition but that it is related to early language input that involves discussions of mental states. Research with native signing deaf children from deaf families is particularly informative. This work reveals the extent to which the expression of ToM on measures of false belief understanding is dependent on early and continuing access to conversation and pragmatic awareness.
11:45 Natalie SEBANZ, University of Birmingham The Role of Theory of Mind in Joint Action Humans are able to coordinate their actions with one another quickly and efficiently, be it playing a piano duet, moving furniture, or navigating through heavy traffic. To what extent does the ability to engage in joint action rely on theory of mind? I will review recent studies on entrainment, simulation of actions, emotions, and sensations, as well as task sharing to discuss whether such "lower-level" mechanisms are sufficient for engaging in joint action. I will also provide some ideas as to how the ability to attribute mental states to others and to take others' perspective could be working in concert with these more basic processes.
14:00
3 Ori FRIEDMAN, University of Waterloo Theory of Mind and Pretense Beginning in early childhood (before 18 months), young children engage in, recognize, and share in pretend play. What is the conceptual basis of these abilities? The mentalist account (also known as the metarepresentational account) holds that children represent pretense via concept PRETEND. Because PRETEND is a mental state concept, this account implies that pretense is an early example of “theory of mind”. In contrast, behavioral accounts claim that children only view pretense as a kind of behavior, ‘behaving-as-if’. This talk will review the debate between these two accounts of early pretense, and will outline recent theoretical arguments and experimental findings favoring the mentalist account of pretense.
15:00 Kristine H. ONISHI, McGill University Representational Mind in Infancy As adults, we tend to believe that the other people with whom we interact have minds, specifically epresentational minds. That is, we explain the behavior of others by resorting to the idea that they behave (in part) on the basis of what they think or what they have represented in their minds about the world. Evidence that children understand that others have minds has often relied on the child's success at a standard false-belief task (e.g., Wimmer & Perner, 1983; Wellman, Cross, & Watson, 2001) in which Sally sees an object is hidden in locationA, then, unbeknownst to Sally the object is moved to locationB and the child is asked where Sally will search for the object. I will describe evidence suggesting that infants understand some aspects of representational mind and discuss links with language.
16:15 Elisabeth PACHERIE, Institut Jean Nicod EHESS Collective Intention, Joint Actions and Understanding of Other It is generally agreed that the dimensions of cooperation and coordination are essential to joint actions and that joint actions are therefore more than just a summation of individual actions. But how do we capture these essential dimensions of joint actions? What are the cognitive capacities an agent must possess to become a participant in joint actions? In particular, what forms of understanding of the intentions and actions of other participants are required? Some philosophers, like Bratman, argue that joint actions require a particular kind of interdependence among the individual intentions of the participants, which in turns requires these participants to have robust meta-representational abilities. Others, like Searle, argue instead that the capacity to engage in joint actions presupposes a "Background sense of the other as a candidate for cooperative agency", where this Background capacity is taken to be a brute biological phenomenon rather than an intentional phenomenon. I will argue that neither account captures the whole story and that many joint actions require that both the agents' minds and their bodies coordinate in time and space. The successful performance of joint actions requires not just that participating agents have interdependent intentions but also that, while carrying out their intentions, they be able to coordinate and mutually adjust their actions in time and space. I will discuss several cognitive mechanisms involved in the spatio-temporal coordination of joint actions, the extent to which they are appealed to in different types of joint actions, and the form of understanding of others they manifest.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Theories of Mind Hélène POISSANT, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
4 MONDAY, JUNE 30TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Social Emotion Kevin S. LABAR, Duke University Theories of Emotion This lecture will provide a broad overview of psychological and neurobiological theories of emotion. Historical accounts of emotion and the brain will be reviewed as well as contemporary perspectives derived from social, cognitive, and neuroscientific domains. The scientific study of emotion raises a host of ethical and methodological challenges. Discussion of some of these issues and possible solutions to them will help students understand how to overcome the limitations of conducting emotion research. The applicability of laboratory-based paradigms to inform clinical disorders, especially in the context of understanding neural mechanisms from animal models, will be emphasized. The relationship between emotion and cognition will be debated, and studies highlighting the importance of emotional cues in social perception and during interpersonal exchanges will be introduced. Students should come away from the lecture with a basic grasp of the foundations of the field of affective neuroscience.
10:45 Eliot R. SMITH, The University of Sheffield Emotion and Group Recent advances in understanding prejudice and intergroup behavior have made clear that emotions are often a central component of people's reactions to social groups and their members. Intergroup Emotions Theory (Smith & Mackie, in press; Smith, 1993) holds that emotions can be experienced by individuals when they identify with a social group. A group (either a small face-to- face group or a larger social category such as an ethnic, religious, or national group) becomes part of the psychological self through the process of group identification, thereby acquiring emotional significance. But what differentiates such group-level emotions from emotions that occur purely at the individual level? We argue that four key criteria define group-level emotions: group emotions are distinct from the same person's individual-level emotions, depend on the person’s degree of group identification, are socially shared within a group, and contribute to regulating intragroup and intergroup attitudes and behavior. Evidence from two studies supports all four of these predictions and thus points to the meaningfulness, coherence, and functionality of group-level emotions.
11:45 Ursula HESS, University du Québec à Montréal Emotion Expression in Groups In general, we assume that a certain expressive behavior will be perceived as signaling the same internal state regardless of who shows it. However, this is not the case. Rather same expression when shown by different encoders can acquire different meaning. Conversely, the same meaning may be attributed to different expressions in different cultural context. The role of social influences on the communication of emotion will be explored.
14:00 Todd F. H EATHERTON, Dartmouth College Emotion and the Self Social brain science is an emerging field that encompasses researchers who combine approaches of evolutionary psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience to study human behavior. This talk focuses on how such an approach can provide new insights into one aspect of social cognition—the
5 human sense of self. A unitary sense of self that exists across time and place is a central feature of human experience, at least for most people. Understanding the nature of self—what it is and what it does—has challenged scholars for many centuries. A fundamental question about is whether information processed with reference to self has some privileged status in the brain, or whether it is functionally equivalent to semantic processing about other classes of stimuli, such as animals, vegetables, or sports cars. Put simply, is self-referential processing special in any way? Unfortunately, competing theories in psychology make the same behavioral predictions regarding self-referential processes. However, the use of neuroimaging has demonstrated that information relevant to self may indeed receive special processing by the brain. The second half of the talk examines the affective basis of self, especially in terms of understanding the self under threat. Behavioral and imaging data will be presented that support a functional account of self-esteem; namely that low self-esteem may reflect a heightened sensitivity to the possibility of social rejection. The overall goal of the talk is to provide examples of how social neuroscientists are attempting to examine some of the most fascinating and previously intractable aspects of the essential social nature of human life.
15:00 Philip JACKSON, Université Laval Sharing and Understanding the Pain of Others Several brain imaging studies have shown that observation of other people receiving pain triggers a cerebral response similar to what is observed when people receive nociceptive stimuli. Results from different laboratories also confirm that this type of empathy for pain can tap into the affective component of pain but also, under specific conditions, into the sensori-discriminative one. We will discuss how these findings could help us understand not only the pain experience, but also the empathic response and behaviour of people observing and sharing this experience. We will argue that the understanding of the others’ experiences stems from at least two interacting processes: an automatic sensory-affective sharing mechanisms and a more controlled ability to adopt the perspective of others.
16:15 Dan R. KELLY, Purdue University Moral Disgust and Tribal Instincts: a Byproduct Hypothesis I argue that a byproduct hypothesis best accounts for the operation of disgust in the social and putatively moral domains. More specifically, disgust has been shown to shape a certain class of social norms called purity norms, and to influence reactions to ethnic boundary markers of outgroups.I first clarify some of the social roles that disgust has come to play by embedding it in the framework of gene-culture coevolutionary theory, emphasizing the tribal instinct hypothesis. I then show how disgust, which initially evolved to monitor food intake and protect against parasites and pathogens, performs many of those social and moral roles in a highly idiosyncratic, sometimes overtly irrational way. I argue that most of these irregularities can be explained as byproducts, features of an emotion that are adaptive behavior when it is performing its primary functions, but which can seem puzzling and irrational when the emotion is coopted into the social domain.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Social Emotion Ursula HESS, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
TUESDAY, JULY 1ST
6 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Morality Jesse J. PRINZ, University of North Carolina The Cognitive Science of Morality There is growing evidence that emotions play an active role in moral cognition, but the exact nature of that role is under debate. I argue, on the basis of evidence from psychology and neuroscience that emotions are not mere accompaniments to moral judgments but are actual essential components, without which moral judgment would be impossible. Moral judgments are emotional states. These emotional states depend on moral values, which I define as sentiments, or emotional dispositions. Which emotion we experience when making a moral judgment depends on the nature of the transgression under consideration and the transgressor. This picture raises a question about where our moral sentiments come from. I argue that is is not biology that determines our values, but culture. Moral values are culturally shaped emotional dispositions. If that is right, the study of culture should have a central place in empirical moral psychology.
10:45 James BLAIR, University College London, Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience The Neurosciences of Morality The goal of this paper is to consider what is known about the neural systems involved and their functional contributions. Four main claims will be made. First, and in contrast to some other theorists, it will be argued that there is no one moral system. Instead, it will be argued that different emotion learning systems are recruited for the acquisitions of different forms of social rules; i.e., there are different moral systems. Second, the emotional “learning” systems involve the amygdala, insula and to a lesser extent inferior frontal cortex. Data will be presenting implicating these systems in different forms of social rule learning. Third, vmPFC serves a cross modality function allowing the representation of different forms of reinforcement expectancy and thus may be implicated in reasoning about a variety of different moralities. Fourth, other regions, including dorsal anterior cingulate cortex use the reinforcement outcome information that vmPFC represents for moral, and other forms of, decision making.
11:45 Paul BLOOM, Yale University Moral Circles Who do we care about? How is it that we judge that it is wrong to harm this person, or that we are obliged to help that person? This talk describes three ongoing experimental research programs, looking at (a) moral and social intuitions in babies; (b) disgust and the shutting-down of empathy; and (c) how stories can generate sympathy. It ends with some peculations about the interplay of emotion and reason in moral judgment and moral feeling.
14:00 Charles C. H ELWIG, University of Toronto Culture and Morality: Concepts of Rights, Freedoms and Democratic Decision Making Cultural comparisons are central in helping to disentangle universal from local and relative aspects of social and moral understandings. However, the role played by culture is a source of continuing controversy in the field of moral development. On the one hand, cultural psychologists (e.g., Shweder, Miller) have emphasized how social cognition is influenced, determined, and shaped by cultural orientations. In contrast, constructivist theories (e.g., Turiel’s social domain theory) have stressed how individuals construct social understandings out of a variety of social experiences, including those arising in the context of moral interactions that involve issues of rights and justice.
7 Drawing on my own research with adolescents from China and Canada exploring conceptions of individual rights (e.g., freedoms) and democracy, I will illustrate commonalities in the development of these notions across diverse cultures as well as how these concepts are applied in ways that vary by cultural setting.
15:00 C. Daniel BATSON, University of Kansas Altruism - A Psychological Perspective Do we humans ever, in any degree, care about others for their sakes and not simply for our own? The empathy-altruism hypothesis offers an affirmative answer to this question. It claims that empathic concern (an other-oriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of another individual) produces altruistic motivation (a motivational state with the ultimate goal of increasing the other’s welfare). Over the past 35 years, other researchers and I have attempted to test the empathy-altruism hypothesis using laboratory experiments and have, overall, found quite strong support. Altruistic motivation does seem to be within the human repertoire. Of course, fundamental questions remain: What produces empathic concern? Can we give a plausible account of the evolution of empathy-induced altruism? What are the theoretical and practical implications if empathy-induced altruism exists? Is it necessarily a source of morality? I shall briefly address each of these questions.
16:15 Joshua R. KNOBE, University of North Carolina Intention and Moral Judgment Research in experimental philosophy has shown that people's moral judgments can actually influence their intuitions about whether a behavior was performed intentionally. At first, it was assumed that this effect was revealing something peculiar or quirky about people's concept of intentional action in particular. However, subsequent studies have shown that the effect is actually a far more pervasive one. People's moral judgments affect not only their intuitions about how to apply the concept intentionally but also their intuitions about how to apply the concepts causation, desire, consciousness, valuing, the distinction between doing and allowing, and the practice of reason explanation. I'll talk about some of this research and the implications it might have for our understanding of the role of morality in human cognition.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Morality Heidi MEIBOM, Moderator, Carleton University
THURSDAY, JULY 3RD 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Communities and Social Networks Barry WELLMAN, University of Toronto Networked Lives On and Offline A social transformation began _before_ the Internet, from door-to-door to place-to-place societies. It is now continuing as person-to-person networks that link individuals -- not groups. I use evidence from a variety of sources, including our NetLab's Connected Lives study in Toronto to show that communities are flourishing, combining online and offline contact.
10:45
8 Emmanuel LAZEGA, Université Paris Dauphine The Collegial Phenomenon: Toward a Sociological Theory of Knowledge Production, Exchange and Sharing In the knowledge economy, access to tacit knowledge has become an important source of competitive advantage for specialized producers of all kinds. Tacit knowledge is a scarce and privately shared resource before it is -sometimes, to some extent- translated and codified into publicly shared common knowledge. Studies of the processes of learning and coorientation in collective action in various contexts are used to provide a neo-structural theory of the production and exchange of tacit knowledge, and thus to focus on the micro- and meso-social conditions under which this translation occurs. Analyses of various kinds of advice networks provide empirically- based insights into the social conditions of this translation and subsequent knowledge sharing.
11:45 Colin ALLEN, Indiana University Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong The hyper-intelligent machines of science fiction are years away, perhaps even impossible to achieve. However, computers are already approving financial transactions, controlling electrical supplies, driving trains, and directing other tasks that affect our well being. Soon, service robots will be taking care of the elderly in their homes, and military robots will have their own targeting and firing protocols. Everyone whose life is affected by computers and robots making decisions on their own -— which is to say, virtually everyone living in the modern world —- needs to be assured that these autonomous systems will act in our best interests. Rosalind Picard put it well when she wrote, "The greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards." In a forthcoming book titled "Moral Machines: Teaching Robots Right from Wrong", Wendell Wallach and Colin Allen call for robots and computers to be programmed with moral decision-making abilities. But is the development of artificial moral agents (AMAs) desirable or possible? The book, and this talk, will explore six questions: Do we need AMAs? When? For what? Do we want computers making ethical decisions? Whose morality or what morality? How can we make ethics computable?
14:00 Rosaria CONTE, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Emergence of Norms in Multi-Agent Systems In the first part of the presentation, two views of norms held in the MAS field, as either emergent conventions or imposed obligations, will be discussed. An alternative approach will be proposed to consist of treating social norms as macro-regularities that result from the spreading of the corresponding normative belief and command over the same population. In the second part of the presentation, a normative agent architecture will be illustrated, especially the norm-recognition module. The latter’s application to agent-based simulation studies of norm emergence will be presented. Macro-regularities emerging from populations of Social Conformers - who imitate their fellows – will be compared with those achieved by Norm Recognizers – who follow the norms they recognize as such. Results will be shown to indicate that the norm recognizers produce a more heterogeneous but more stable convergence, what seems to follow from a greater autonomy of this type of agents compared to social conformers.
15:00 Toru ISHIDA, Tokyo University Language Infrastructure for Multicultural Community
9 To increase the accessibility and usability of online language services, this talk proposes the Language Grid to create composite language services for various intercultural collaborative works. The Language Grid is an initiative to build an infrastructure that allows end users to create new language services for their intercultural / multilingual activities. To this end, language resources (including data and programs) are wrapped to form Web services that users can combine easily to realize workflows that suit their own activities. The Language Grid is called "horizontal," when the grid connects the standard languages, or "vertical," when the grid combines the language services generated by communities. There are four types of stakeholders in the Language Grid: Language Resource Provider, Computation Resource Provider, Language Service User, and Language Grid Operator (who coordinates the other stakeholders). Though there can be various operation models for the Language Grid, we propose a non-profit operation model in this paper. This model limits the usage of language services solely to non-profit operations, tries to match the incentives of stakeholders, and manages various problems associated with intellectual property rights, user privacy, and operation costs. Even though language resources will become easy to use, we still lack a complete understanding of how machine translation affects collaboration. Using a machine translation embedded chat system, we investigated eight pairs from three different language communities, China, Korea, and Japan, working on referential tasks in their shared second language (English) and in their native languages. The result reveals further research issues on machine translation mediated collaboration.
16:15 Ronald BREIGER, University of Arizona Sociability and Social Capital James Coleman and Pierre Bourdieu are two of the most important innovators of the contemporary concept of social capital (and other forms of capital). Their conceptions of sociology, and their views on appropriate methods for social analysis, are often contrasted as opposing theories. However, focusing on their methods, I will illustrate some startling convergences in their discussions of social capital, and I will use this discovery to raise some questions about their sociology more generally. I will be concerned with the (under-theorized) role of knowledge and cognition in social capital theories, and with how to move beyond Coleman and Bourdieu in this respect. Examples will be drawn from social fields and networks of career gatekeepers, journal citations, investment banks, household visitation and occupational structure, and other arenas.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Communities and Social Networks Daniel MEMMI, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
FRIDAY, JULY 4TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Knowledge Communities TBA, University of Abstract will be added shortly.
10:45 Aude DUFRESNE, Université de Montréal Cognitive and Social Tools for Knowledge Communities Abstract will be added shortly.
11:45 Chris JONES, The Open University
10 Networked Learning: a Variety of Ties for the Creation of Knowledge This talk will be concerned with networked learning and its relationship to concepts such as weak links and boundaries. The session will explore the nature of ties and networked relations in the context of networked learning defined as: learning in which C&IT is used to promote connections: between one learner and other learners, between learners and tutors; between a learning community and its learning resources. This definition has two particular strengths that make it both robust and generalisable. The emphasis on resources as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for networked learning and the emphasis on connections, the interactions through which networked learning occurs. This definition implies that networked learning takes place through a variety of ties and the background paper by Jones, Ferreday and Hodgson takes the idea of weak links from Grannoveter and relates this work to ideas about dialogue derived from Bakhtin.
14:00 Sasha BARAB, Indiana University Transactive Narrative and the Power of Videogames for Education Our society is in the middle of an interesting transition in which teachers and schools are held increasingly accountable for students’ acquisition of particular content, but are at the same time facing a generation of students who view school subjects as largely irrelevant to their own lives. Over the last decade, video games and other online media have become one of the most significant forums for the enculturation of youth. In most contemporary videogames, learners do not mindlessly click on buttons, but instead engage in rich narrative storylines and employ complex discursive practices and problem solving strategies as they come to master and appreciate the underlying game dynamics. Leveraging this powerful medium, my work is situated within the Quest Atlantis project (http://QuestAtlantis.org), an international learning and teaching project that uses a 3D multi-user environment to immerse over 15,000 children worldwide, ages 9–15, in educational tasks. In this presentation, I will share the theoretical motivations and some examples from our work to illuminate the power of videogames for engaging youth in rich storylines through which they come to understand disciplinary content at the same time developing a disposition for social action. Read more of the work linked from my website: http://inkido.indiana.edu/barab
15:00 Pierre-Léonard HARVEY, Université du Québec à Montréal Community Informatics and Social System Design for Raising Collective Intelligence in Society Community Informatics (Communautique) was recognized as an autonomous field of research in the 1990s from a group of researchers and practitioners concerned to enhanced the possibility for communities and larger social systems to contribute to the construction of the knowledge society and the design of large socio-technical systems. Community informatics designers and researchers are trying to develop a corpus of knowledge in design science, social system design and action research projects in exploring the power of Information and Communication Technology for enabling democracy and empowering the collective intelligence of virtual communities in different sociotechnical systems, in the service of societal emancipation and sustainable development. For the community informatics designer, the unit of analysis is not limited to the traditional organizational perspective of information science with its typical information processing and enterprise business process requirements, modeling and programming. Rather, CI is interested in the many ways to configure these technologies in evolving communities and emancipatory social systems : communities of practice, knowledge building communities, virtual communities of interest, geographically based communities, internetworked organization. Community system design is developped in four complementary ways : the design of community information and communication system (knowledge production and sharing among communities and social
11 systems); the way to integrate communication theories, the work activity (learning, designing, searching) and the social context of users in the sociotechnical system which is being designed ; the exploration of principles of evolutionary system thinking and the notion of self-organization in the co-design of socio-technical system by non-experts; and the need of different stakeholders to play an active role in the requirements, development, deployment and evaluation that arises from the community informatics approach. From a methodological perspective CI puts forward new questions and challenges as for example : how to apply Participatory Systems Design, Systems Inquiry, Design Research and Action Research methodology in social planning and socio-economic development? And how to use Internet as a particular social system that can help other social subsystem to face the complexity of social life and to build collective intelligence of human societies at the global level? With the development and advance of recent collaborative technologies, the World Wide Web 2.0 (communityware and social software like collaborative e-learning tools,wikis, blogs, podcasting, file sharing, wikipedia, MySpace) can and ought to play a major role in raising collective intelligence. We state that the creation of new communities of co-design is the next step required to enable collective intelligence by extending cooperation and collaboration in cyberspace with the aim to enhance –not only cognition, information or communication as it was done so far in the previous web generation- but also cooperation and social creativity in the real world.
16:15 Bernard CONEIN, Groupe de sociologie politique et moral EHESS Digital Network Technology and Distributed Cognition
The aim of the tutorial is to shed light on the cognitive properties of Digital Network Technology as a genre of Cognitive Artifacts that enhance both cooperation and social learning. Much of advanced cognition is the result of an extended cognition accomplishment supported by cognitive technology. We argue that Network Digital Technology facilitates an epistemic use of electronic tools by sustaining the proliferation of distinct communication networks. Knowledge transmission based on Digital Network Technology is achieved through the channel of threaded communication networks, suggesting that the structures of threads conceived as communication networks modify the way knowledge is acquired and transformed. Observations taken from patterns of replies of threads in Open-Source Communities will illustrate the argument.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Knowledge Communities France HENRI, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
SATURDAY, JULY 5TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Multi-Agent Cognition Larry SANGER, Citizendium Citizendium: Web 2.0 with Expert Guidance and Real Names Abstract will be added shortly.
10:45 Deb Roy, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Situated Language Use : Robots, Children and Games Our lab aims to create machines that use language in human-like ways, and to better understand and model human-human communication using new methods of observation and analysis. In the first part of this talk, I will develop a model of how referential semantics is grounded in physical interaction based on experiments with conversational robots [1,2]. Second, I will discuss the capture
12 and analysis of communicative “interaction traces” of adults engaged in two-player computer games [3,4], and of child development based on rich longitudinal in vivo observation [5].
11:45 Angelo CANGELOSI, University of Plymouth Artificial Life and Virtual Robotics Computational approaches to modeling adaptive behavior and cognition, such as artificial life and cognitive developmental robotics, are advantageous when studying the evolution of language and communication (Cangelosi & Parisi 2002). In these models, the level of description of the communicating agents and their environment varies significantly. This constitutes a continuum from ungrounded, abstract agent models to grounded multi-agent and robotic approaches. This work focuses on the use of adaptive grounded agents where (i) symbols are directly grounded in the agents’ own sensorimotor and cognitive abilities and (ii) the communicative/linguistic behavior are acquired (evolutionarily and developmentally) through the interaction of agents in their physical and social environment. In such grounded adaptive agent models, the perceptual, motor, cognitive and linguistic capabilities of the agents are controlled by evolving neural networks. Various models and simulations on the evolution and acquisition of linguistic communication will be discussed. For example, an artificial life simulation studies the evolutionary origins of linguistic categories, such as nouns and verbs, and their grounding in sensorimotor abilities (Cangelosi 2001). Here the techniques of categorical perception and synthetic brain imaging are used to analyze the sensorimotor bases of linguistic structure. In a related artificial life model we test the symbolic theft hypothesis of language evolution (Cangelosi & Harnad, 2000) to compare the adaptive advantage of communication (symbolic theft) versus foraging based on direct perception Finally, an extension of artificial life models of language emergence to cognitive robotics models of language learning will be presented. In a simulated robotic model we show how agents can autonomously evolve grasping and object manipulation skills (Massera, Cangelosi & Nolfi, 2007) and learn to use name of actions to acquire higher-order sensorimotor categories (Cangelosi & Riga, 2006). We will then discuss the extension of this robotic modeling work to experiments with humanoid robots within the new EU project “ITALK: Integration and Transfer of Action and Language Knowledge in Robots” (italkproject.org).
14:00 Rob WILSON, University of Alberta The Extended Mind Philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists have recently entertained the extended mind hypothesis, the idea that the mind and cognition extend beyond the boundary of the body. This talk will provide an overview of this hypothesis and some of the considerations that have arisen in debating its truth with an emphasis on addressing the question of why this debate matters to psychologists and cognitive scientists themselves. The short answer to this question is that the debate both reflects deep-seated views of what cognition is and what constitutes an appropriate way to study it, and points the way to new opportunities for transdisciplinary work on the nature of cognition.
15:00 Shimon EDELMAN, Cornell University Bootstrapping Language With a Little Help From One's Friends To be able to generalize --- that is, to make sense of novel stimuli and to produce useful novel behaviors --- a cognitive system must be capable of distilling patterns that are common to previously encountered stimuli or behaviors. Any such attempt to discover structure in data must
13 rely on alignment and comparison of potentially related items, be they representations of visual scenes, conceptual networks, or speech utterances (Edelman and Waterfall, 2007). Indeed, alignment and comparison, followed by estimation of the significance of the distilled patterns, are at the core of the recently developed effective algorithms for unsupervised learning of natural language grammars (Solan et al., 2005, Sandbank et al., 2007). There are indications that natural discourse, and especially child-directed speech, is structured so as to facilitate pattern discovery through these operations. In particular, variation set structure --- partial alignment of successive utterances in child-directed speech --- has been shown to correlate with progress in the acquisition of syntax by children (Waterfall, 2006). Moreover, arranging a certain proportion of utterances in a training corpus in variation sets facilitates word segmentation and phrase structure learning in miniature artificial languages by adults (Onnis, Waterfall, and Edelman, submitted). Thus, recognizing the social nature of language helps explain its hitherto most puzzling property: the ability of novice language users to bootstrap themselves into mastery by learning from examples, starting with very little initial knowledge beside the propensity to compare one utterance to another. Parts of this presentation refer to joint work with Zach Solan, Eytan Ruppin, David Horn, Ben Sandbank, Jonathan Berant, Heidi Waterfall, and Luca Onnis.
16:15 Rebecca WILLIAMSON, University of Washington Social Cognition, Social Learning, Shared Goals A quick and efficient way to learn is from the examples of others. This talk explores theoretical questions concerning the voluntary aspects of observational learning, including when children make use of others’ examples, who they copy, and what types of information they can learn. We report experimental data in support of the claims that children regulate their use of other’s behaviors depending on how effective those acts are, as well as by the apparent overall goal of the demonstration. From this new research and the previous work of others, we conclude that children are flexible and selective learners, choosing when, what, and whom to imitate.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Multi-Agent Cognition Stevan HARNAD, Moderator, Université du Québec à Montréal
SUNDAY, JULY 5TH 09:00 - MORNING TUTORIAL - Cognition in Context: Cognitive Technology James A. HENDLER, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute Distributed Knowledge in the Semantic Web There are currently several different approaches to semantics and the Semantic Web floating around. While the uptake of these technologies are going extremely well, there is still confusion about what sort of technology fits where and how it works. The confusion is made worse because the term "ontology" is used in several different ways. In this talk, I will describe how these different sorts of models can be used to link data in different ways. I will particularly explore different kinds of Web applications, from Enterprise Data Integration to Web 3.0 startups, and the different kinds of techniques needed for these different approaches.
10:45 Robert GOLDSTONE, Indiana University Group Behavior as a Complex System
14 Just as ants interact to form elaborate colonies and neurons interact to create structured thought, groups of people interact to create emergent organizations that the individuals may not understand or even perceive. My laboratory has begun to study the emergence of group behavior from a complex adaptive systems perspective. We have developed an internet-based experimental platform (for examples, see http://groups.psych.indiana.edu/) that allows groups of 2-200 people to interact with each other in real time on networked computers. I will sample findings from four collective behavior paradigms that use this platform. The first concerns competitive foraging for resources by individuals inhabiting an environment consisting largely of other individuals foraging for the same resources. The second concerns the formation of path systems when people can take advantage of the paths forged by others. The third concerns the dissemination of innovations in social networks. The fourth concerns situations where the group as a whole attempts to solve a coordination problem. Across the four scenarios, the group-level behavior that emerges reveals tradeoffs between exploration and exploitation, bandwagon effects, population waves, spontaneous division of cognitive labor, specialization into roles, and compromises between individuals using their own information and information obtained from their peers.
Katy BÖRNER, Indiana University The Science of Science Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind's explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown monsters. Domain maps of abstract semantic spaces, see http://scimaps.org, aim to serve today's explorers understanding and navigating the world of science. The maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly datasets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of interest. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area: its homogeneity, import-export factors, and relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective scholarly knowledge. This talk will present an overview of the techniques and cyber-technologies used to study science by scientific means together with sample science maps and their interpretations.
11:45 Christiane FELLBAUM, Princeton University Mapping the Lexicon Via WordNet The lexicon of a language is vast, irregular, and open-ended; yet human language users effortlessly store and retrieve tens of thousands of words along with knowledge about the concepts they express. Meaning similarity is a major principle in the organization of the mental lexicon. While traditional dictionaries do not reflect this, the digital resource WordNet interconnects words based on their semantic relatedness. The resultant nework can be navigated by computers to detect and measure meaning similarity. WordNet is used in many applications that attempt to process language and understand both overtly expressed and implied meaning. WordNet's use in natural language understanding provides a testing ground for theories of the lexicon and lexicalization patterns. WordNets that were subsequently built in dozens of unrelated language yield a perspective on the universality of concepts and their linguistic encoding.
14:00 Pierre LÉVY, Ottawa University
15 Collective Intelligence Abstract will be added shortly.
15:00 Rolf ZWAAN, Erasmus University Roterdam Grounding Language Language comprehension has long been understood as the comprehension of language-first as the recovery of the syntactic and semantic structure of the linguistic input, and later as the construction of a situation model based on the linguistic input and background knowledge. I will argue that language comprehension is better understood as comprehension with language. That is, language comprehension is a special form of event and action comprehension. In both cases, comprehension appears to involve a mental simulation of the actions and events. However, comprehension with language is special because the mental simulation is not modulated directly by the observed actions and events, but indirectly via language. Thus, the key to developing a theory of language comprehension is to examine how language modulates mental simulations of actions and events. I will discuss recent empirical findings from my lab that speak to this issue.
16:15 Cristiano CASTELFRANCHI, Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies Cognitive Social Agents: Main Challenges Why we need not just 'automatic' but 'autonomous' artificial systems ('agents'). What 'autonomy' means, and how an agent - thanks to its 'mind' - is autonomous from its environment and from the other agents (socially autonomous). What kind of cognitive architecture is needed for autonomy? We will analyze real 'collaboration' and how we rely on an autonomous agent: delegating goals and unspecified plans; relying on the other's 'over-help', initiative, and goal-recognition. The need for 'mind reading': cooperation and trust. Rules violation for cooperation. The crucial role of expectations' and their nature. Coordination without explicit communication protocols: behavior and its traces as messages; mutual understanding, and tacit agreements. Grounding cooperation (and sociality) on mental attitudes. The central issue of social cognition: 'goal-adoption'. Individual 'social' mind and action before and as the basis for collective activity. Affective interaction beyond face recognition and expression: reacting to the cognitive stuff behind the emotional signal. Future challenges for cognitive social Agents.
17:15 - PLENARY SESSION - Cognition in Context: Cognitive Technology Itiel DROR, Moderator, University of Southampton
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