Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

The "Embodiment of Thinking" a musical interlude/lesson sung by Dr. Ken Cheng.

Robert Hampton introduces Ken Cheng: Ants as a group feature especially small brains even for their small size, and yet many species are expert navigators forging learned routes about their habitat. Working to bring food to their next, they make excellent research animals for navigational research because they do not satiate when given food repeatedly. I review briefly ants' navigational tool kit, with part integration, view-based navigation (and to some extent cues of other modalities), and systematic search being chief components. Then I describe some evidence on two major themes. First, ants integrate cues from multiple navigational systems that are processed in parallel. In some cases, they even integrate in an optimal (Bayesian) fashion. Second, how ants learn to use views for navigation and how they modify view-based navigation on the basis of experience (learning) has recently been investigated. I highlight some recent work on this experimental ethology of learning to navigate.

All biological sounds originate with body movements. However, theories of speech production and perception have not generally been grounded in models of how bodies move. In this talk, I will argue that the body has been a crucial missing link in theories of speech, and will show how a deeper – and less culturally biased – understanding of the body’s role in speech, gained partly through advances in biomechanical simulation, can help us to make sense of how sounds are produced for communication. I will show how this framework sheds light on such wide-ranging issues as: why languages universally use similar movement inventories, how movement variation becomes speech variation and sound change, links between speech and non-speech functions such as digestion, respiration and emotion expression, whether spoken and signed language follow similar principles, the role of sensory feedback in speech, and how innate infant behaviors bootstrap speech.

High Church evolutionary psychology casts the human mind as a collection of cognitive instincts - organs of thought shaped by genetic evolution and constrained by the needs of our Stone Age ancestors. This picture was plausible 25 years ago but, I argue, it no longer fits the facts. Research in psychology and neuroscience - involving nonhuman animals, infants and adult humans - now suggests that genetic evolution has merely tweaked the human mind, making us more friendly than our pre-human ancestors, more attentive to other agents, and giving us souped-up, general-purpose mechanisms of learning, memory and cognitive control. Using these resources, our special-purpose organs of thought are built in the course of development through social interaction. They are products of cultural rather than genetic evolution, cognitive gadgets rather than cognitive instincts. In making the case for cognitive gadgets, I’ll suggest that experimental evidence from computational cognitive science is an important and neglected r

A striking feature of the real world is that there is too much to think about. This feature is remarkably understudied in laboratory contexts, where the study of decision-making is typically limited to small “choice sets” defined by an experimenter. In such cases an individual may devote considerable attention to each item in the choice set. But in everyday life we are often not presented with defined choice sets; rather, we must construct a viable set of alternatives to consider. I will present several recent and ongoing research projects that each aim to understand how humans spontaneously decide what actions to consider—in other words, how we construct choice sets. A common theme among these studies is a key role for cached value representations. Additionally, I will present some evidence that moral norms play a surprisingly and uniquely large role in constraining choice sets and, more broadly, in modal cognition. This suggests a new avenue for understanding the specific manner in which morality i

I outline a computational theory of phenomenal conscious experience, that is, of the basic awareness and its obligatory attendant feelings, involving neither the awareness of awareness nor a sense of self. This Dynamical Emergence Theory (DET) identifies phenomenality with certain intrinsic properties of the dynamics of the system in question. More specifically, it aims to explain the structure, the quantity, and the quality of phenomenal experience in terms of trajectories through the space of the system's emergent metastable macrostates and their intrinsic (that is, observer-independent) topology and geometry. Joint work with Roy Moyal and Tomer Fekete.

What does it mean to know language? Since the Chomskian revolution, one popular answer to this question has been: to possess a generative grammar that exclusively licenses certain syntactic structures. Decades later, not even an approximation to such a grammar, for any language, has been formulated; the idea that grammar is universal and innately specified has proved barren; and attempts to show how it could be learned from experience invariably come up short. To move on from this impasse, we must rediscover the extent to which language is like any other human behavior: dynamic, social, multimodal, patterned, and purposive, its purpose being to promote desirable actions (or thoughts) in others and self. Recent psychological, computational, neurobiological, and evolutionary insights into the shaping and structure of behavior may then point us toward a new, viable account of language.

What are the components of musical ability, and to what extent are they shared with spoken language processing? Both music and language are composed of sounds combined into complex sequences. Both also exhibit tonality, pitch, and rhythmic grouping and convey emotional meaning. Drs. Laura Emmery (Department of Music) and Christina Tzeng (Department of Psychology) will explore the intersections between these two phenomena. Dr Emmery will address some of the mental processes that underlie music behaviors—how emotion, environment, individual preferences, and other factors influence how we perceive music. Dr. Tzeng will share insights into the extent to which the cognitive and perceptual abilities that enable human language might also be shared with music. Drawing from music theory and psychology, we will discuss the functional significance of music and language in the human experience.

How your digital footprint can improve your life, advance science, and harm you

To make sense of sound, there is a wide activation of sensorimotor, cognitive, and reward circuitry in the brain. Active and repeated engagement with sounds that activate all these circuits, therefore, is a route to honing our brain function. Playing music is like hitting the jackpot for the brain because it requires the motor system, deeply engages our emotions, and absolutely gives us a cognitive workout. We have employed a biological approach, the frequency-following response (FFR), to reveal the integrity of sound processing in the brain and how these brain processes are shaped by music training. We have found that music works in synergistic partnerships with language skills and the ability to make sense of speech in noisy, everyday listening environments. We have found that music brings about a “speeding” of auditory system development, and a tendency toward a reversal of the biological impact of poverty-induced linguistic deprivation. The generalization from music to everyday communication illustrates b

Cultural traits—behaviors that are learned from others—can change more rapidly than genes and can be inherited not only from parents but also from teachers and peers. How does this complex process of cultural evolution differ from and interact with genetic evolution? In this talk, I will discuss the dynamics of culturally transmitted behaviors on dramatically different evolutionary timescales: the learned songs of a family of songbirds and the spoken languages of modern human populations. Both of these behaviors enable communication between individuals and facilitate complex social interactions that can affect genetic evolution. My analyses of these two systems demonstrate that learned behaviors, while less conserved than genetic traits, can retain evolutionary information across great distances and over long timescales.

Which Way to the Dawn of Speech?      (click for link to PowerPoint)Reanalyzing half a century of debates and data in light of speech scienceLouis-Jean Boë  & Thomas R. Sawallis 1 GIPSA-lab, CNRS, Grenoble Alpes University, France2 New College, University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, USAIn the weeks around New Years, 2017, two complementary articles discussing speech evolution appeared in respected general science journals: Fitch et al., 2016, in Science Advances and Boë et al., 2017, in PLOSOne. These two articles announced the final failure of a theory that had been widely propagated and broadly accepted for half a century, despite numerous critiques and partial falsifications: the laryngeal descent theory (LDT) of Lieberman and colleagues (Lieberman, 1968; Lieberman et al., 1969; Lieberman & Crelin, 1971). Taken together, those studies represented – and continue to represent – an extremely powerful research paradigm, drawn directly from the core understanding of speech science, that the acoustic speech

Barbara Ternes was one of several personal assistants to Margaret Mead. Barbara Ternes served as Dr. Mead’s “gatekeeper” during the early 70’s, scheduling and travelling extensively with Dr. Mead. Barbara Ternes was married to the late, Alan Ternes, former Editor Emeritus of the Natural History Magazine and editor of the 1975 publication, Ants, Indidans, and Little Dinosaurs. The Ternes lived in NYC and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. During Dr. Mead’s last days, she lived with Barbara Ternes, at the DeMenille estate on Long Island. Currently, Ms. Ternes lives in Bellows Falls, VT, spends time with her adult children in NYC and frequented Atlanta, GA, spending time with Emory graduate (50C) and friend, the late Father Austin Ford, founder of Emmaus House, an Episcopal outreach in the Peoplestown community of Atlanta. http://www.emoryhistory.emory.edu/facts-figures/people/makers-history/profiles/ford.html (https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/fall95/austinford.html) Ms. Ternes stopped in f

VIDEOAlthough great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and human children suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevant mechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food to special forms of social evaluation. The Shared Intentionality hypothesis specifies the ontogeny of these underlying mechanisms and their consequences for both human cognition and human social life.

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio