Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Language Documentation is a reborn, refashioned, and reenergized subfield of linguistics motivated by the urgent task of creating a record of the world’s fast disappearing languages. In addition to producing resources for communities interested in language and culture preservation, maintenance, and revitalization, language documentation continues to produce data that challenge and improve linguistic theory. A case in point is a pattern of participant marking, i.e. ways that speakers indicate who does what to whom in a sentence, in the endangered languages of the Tibeto-Burman region (Northeast India). From current typological studies we expect one of three participant marking patterns and these are based on purely syntactic factors. From very small languages in and around the Himalayan region we discover that that there is a possible fourth pattern based not on syntax but on information structure and pragmatics – a game changing discovery for syntactic and typological theory. Endangered language data also pro

This talk discusses the wide-ranging potential of immersive virtual reality (IVR) as a research tool in the behavioral sciences. The speaker will discuss her research using IVR to study mundane judgments of the built environment, her emergency evacuation IVR work conducted with engineers and disaster experts, and her social-health work studying HIV risk behavior in highly interactive dating scenarios with virtual dating partners.

Why do today's religions look and function the way they do? Presenting research primarily on religion’s effects on prosocial behavior and prejudice toward outgroups, I will argue that the form and function of modern religions can be understood as the legacy of a millennia-long process of cultural evolution. Our recent research has begun to empirically test perennially debated questions about whether religions make people act more ethically, what functions religions have served, and why some religious traditions have fared better than others. The results reveal that while the social consequences of religion are not always desirable, they can be explained as the product of cultural adaptations that served vital social functions. In particular, I’ll discuss how recurrent elements throughout religions have served to stabilize cooperation among large groups of unrelated strangers, and maximize survival in intergroup competition. Finally, I’ll speak about how this cultural evolutionary perspective informs predictio

A chief stumbling block for a science of consciousness has always been that there are so few ways to measure consciousness. Recent developments in clinical neuroscience suggest a promising new start on this problem, and raise new empirical issues. The progress may also carry some surprising philosophical implications for realists about consciousness.

Scientists have made substantial progress in understanding the evolution of mammalian sleep, yet the evolution of human sleep has been largely ignored in comparative studies. This omission is surprising given the extraordinary mental capacity and behavioral flexibility of humans, and the importance of sleep for human cognitive performance. I will discuss new phylogenetic methods that enable rigorous investigation of sleep along a single evolutionary lineage, and will apply these methods to study human sleep and brain size. In addition, I will present new findings from my lab on sleep in traditional human populations, which sheds additional light on the evolution of human sleep. I will close by considering how evolutionary perspectives provide insights to human sleep disorders, health across the lifespan, and health disparities.

Alena Esposito and Donald Tuten discuss different aspects of research on bilingualism. Dr. Esposito focuses on recent cognitive and neuroscientific research on bilingualism, while Dr. Tuten focuses on fundamental questions in social and cultural approaches to research on bilingualism. Both presenters touch on and consider the implications of these approaches on education and educational approaches to research on bilingualism.

In June 2016, a small group of world-leading neuroscientists, ethicists, social scientists and clinical researchers came together with two goals: to initiate a global research consortium in neuroscience ethics; and to come up with a research agenda for that consortium. Were the goals met? Yes and no. In this talk I identify some of the key clashes, the strange alliances, and the isolation tactics that collectively enabled the consortium to establish an identity and a mission, at a cost. I will draw on some recent theories of disciplinarity to understand what happened in the meeting; but I will also suggest that a key problematic, that between ‘ethics’ and ‘values,’ has not been taken sufficiently seriously by those who endeavour to construct multi- and inter-disciplinary research initiatives in neuroscience ethics.

In my lab, we recently discovered a new type of cognitive bias brought on by the presence of a tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) state for a currently inaccessible word. When in a TOT state, participants think it more likely that a currently unretrievable word was presented in a darker, clearer font upon last seeing it, a larger font upon last seeing it, that it is of higher frequency in the language, and that it starts with a more common first letter in the language. This pattern suggests that TOT states bias people to infer that the unretrieved target information has qualities that tend to characterize fluency or accessibility, even when that is not the case. In further studies, we have found that the TOT’s biasing effects also extend to the immediately surrounding circumstances during the TOT as well. For example, people judge celebrity faces as belonging to more ethical people when in a TOT state for the name than when not, and rate their inclination to take an unrelated gamble as being higher when in a TOT state t

Recent NSF Program Directors Laura Namy and Victoria Powers discuss current funding opportunities from the National Science Foundation and secrets to a successful application.

Why does race serve as the most polarizing feature of American politics? Presumably, Americans have a stake in proclaiming America’s greatness, particularly touting pride in democratic governance, protecting civil rights and liberties, and making progress in areas that serve as ugly scars in its history. Yet research suggests the effects of racial bias now surpass the typical partisan and ideological predispositions that drive political decision making and judgments. This phenomenon is highlighted by public opinion data collected over the past 10 years covering Barack Obama’s presidential candidacy and subsequent administrations. As the prototypically racially neutral African American politician, Barack Obama was expected to inhibit the activation of negative racial appraisals and threat. Contrary to such expectations, a number of studies show this did not happen, as perceptions of Obama and his policies are linked strongly to negative racial attitudes. But negative racial attitudes are not limited to Obama;

What personality traits make for successful politicians? What contributes to political partisanship? In this heated election season, come join Dr. Alan Abramowitz (Political Science) and Dr. Scott Lilienfeld (Psychology) for a conversation about the factors influencing presidential elections from the standpoint of both voters and candidates. Dr. Abramowitz will discuss the growing political partisanship of the American electorate, and its potential sociological and political sources. Dr. Lilienfeld will discuss psychohistorical research on how personality variables (e.g., narcissism, extraversion, antagonism) among U.S. Presidents (and other leaders) predict their success and failure, as well as how such variables might shape voter choices.

Humans routinely confront situations that require coordination between individuals, from mundane activities such as planning where to go for dinner to incredibly complicated activities, such as multi-national agreements. How did this ability arise, and what prevents success in those situations in which it breaks down? To understand how this capability evolved across the primates, my lab uses the methodology of experimental economics. This is an ideal mechanism for the comparative approach as it is a well-developed methodology for distilling complex decision-making in to a series of simple choices, allowing these decisions to be compared across species and contexts using identical methodologies. We have investigated coordination in New World monkeys, Old World monkeys, and great apes, including both chimpanzees and humans. We find that there are remarkable continuities of outcome across the primates, including humans, however there are also important differences in how each species reaches these outcomes. For

Music is ancient and universal in human cultures. In The Descent of Man, Darwin theorized that musical rhythmic processing tapped into ancient and widespread aspects of animal brain function. While appealing, this idea is being challenged by modern cross-species and neurobiological research. In this talk I will describe research supporting the hypothesis that musical beat processing has its origin in another rare biological trait shared by humans and just a few other groups of animals (none of which are primates), namely complex vocal learning. I will also suggest that once the capacity for beat processing arose in our species, it was refined and enhanced by mechanisms of gene-culture coevolution due to the impact of synchronization to a beat on social bonds in early human groups. (March 22, 2016) Sponsored by the CMBC with support from the Hightower Fund, and the Departments of Psychology and Anthropology.

Many scientists believe that the search for simple theories is not optional; rather, it is a requirement of the scientific enterprise. When theories get too complex, scientists reach for Ockham’s razor, the principle of parsimony, to do the trimming. This principle says that a theory that postulates fewer entities, processes, or causes is better than a theory that postulates more, so long as the simpler theory is compatible with what we observe. Ockham’s razor presents a puzzle. It is obvious that simple theories may be beautiful and easy to remember and understand. The hard problem is to explain why the fact that one theory is simpler than another tells you anything about the way the world is. In my lecture, I’ll describe two solutions. (March 15, 2016)

Hominin remains were discovered in October, 2013 within the Rising Star cave system, inside the Cradle of Humankind World Heritage Site, South Africa. Lee Berger and the University of the Witwatersrand organized excavations with a skilled team of archaeologists and support of local cavers, which have to date uncovered 1550 hominin skeletal specimens. The hominin remains represent a minimum of 15 individuals of a previously undiscovered hominin species, which we have named Homo naledi. Aside from its subtantially smaller brain, H. naledi is cranially similar to early Homo species such as Homo habilis, Homo rudolfensis and early Homo erectus, but its postcranial anatomy presents a mosaic that has never before been observed, including very humanlike feet and lower legs, a primitive australopith-like pelvis and proximal femur, primitive ribcage and shoulder configuration, generally humanlike wrists and hand proportions, combined with very curved fingers and a powerful thumb. The geological age of the fossils is n

In this talk, drawn from his book, Beauty and Sublimity: A Cognitive Aesthetics of Literature and the Arts (Cambridge University Press, 2016), Hogan outlines an account of aesthetic response that synthesizes the insights of cognitive neuroscience with those implicit in Virginia Woolf’s novel, Mrs. Dalloway. Hogan begins by briefly outlining an explanation of beauty based on human information processing (specifically, pattern isolation and prototype approximation). He goes on to consider complications. These complications include the simple, but highly consequential matter of differentiating judgments of beauty from aesthetic response. They also include the relative neglect of literature in neurologically-based discussions of beauty, which tend to focus on music or visual art. There is in addition the potentially more difficult issue of the relative neglect of emotion, beyond the reward system. Related to this last point, there is the very limited treatment of the sublime in empirical research and associated t

Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture

The phenomenon of trigger warnings, intended to help guide students in dealing with the emotions raised by difficult or provocative works of art, indicates the ability of artistic works to raise powerful and even cathartic feelings in members of the audience. The author will discuss the use and abuse of these warnings in relation to works of fiction. (February 12, 2016)

This paper begins by setting out several important theories of how music is claimed to “express” human emotions.  An inevitable comparison follows with how human emotions are linguistically constituted and expressed.   This, in turn, highlights the complexity of musical “syntax” and “grammar”  as well as the limits of language—or at least the limits of “cognitive” theories of emotion. Contrasting examples of music will be drawn from Bach, Copeland and Art Tatum’s jazz piano .  I will conclude with some threshold questions about how neuropsychology may contribute to our understanding of relations between music and human emotion. (February 12, 2016)

Emory CMBC Conference: The Foundations of Emotions in Mind, Brain, and Culture