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CBB talk series
The Cognitive Brown Bag (CBB) is a graduate student organized talk series, primarily attended by the faculty, graduate students, and staff from the cognitive labs at Dartmouth College. A list of past CBB talks can be found here.
Academic year 2026-2027
Organizers: Ben Graul (Wager lab), Deepa Prasad (Robertson lab), Claudia Gonciulea (Manning lab), Anthony Dunn (Kraemer lab)
Coming soon: Speaker line-up will be announced in the late summer/early fall!
| Speaker | Title | Abstract | |
| Fall 2026 | |||
| September 22 | Katerina Simkova (Postdoc, Robertson lab) | What we say predicts where we look: Semantic drivers of face looking during natural dyadic conversation | We often think that we maintain eye contact throughout conversation, but in reality, we spend far less time looking at our conversation partner’s face than we might expect. While the pragmatic demands of conversation are known to influence when we look, it remains unclear whether what we say also modulates face looking. Here, we combined mobile eye-tracking with speech embeddings to investigate whether the semantic content of participants’ speech predicts fixations on the listener's face during semi-structured interviews with individuals with and without autism. We identified the dominant dimensions of semantic variation in participants’ speech using principal component analysis and found that three interpretable dimensions were associated with face fixation probability. Independent semantic landmarks confirmed that internally oriented, social content predicted lower face fixation probability, whereas externally oriented, non-social content predicted higher face fixation probability. These effects replicated across language encoders and across the range of autistic traits represented in our sample, revealing a robust relationship between speech semantics and face looking during natural conversation. |
| October 6 | |||
| Ben Graul (Grad student, Wager lab) | |||
| Yong Min Choi (Postdoc, Störmer lab) | |||
| October 20 | |||
| Eun Tack Cho (Grad student, Murray lab) | |||
| Peter Duggins (Postdoc, Soltani lab) | |||
| November 3 | External TBA | ||
| November 10 | |||
| Kevin Ortego (Grad student, Störmer lab) | |||
| Yugantar Prakash (Grad student, Murray lab) | |||
| Winter 2027 | |||
| January 12 | |||
| Zach Paris (Grad student, Finn lab) | |||
| Anthony Dunn (Grad student, Kraemer lab) | |||
| January 26 | |||
| Claudia Gonciulea (Manning lab) | |||
| Wentao Si (Tse lab) | |||
| February 9 | External TBA | ||
| February 23 | |||
| Aryan Yazdanpanah (Grad student, Soltani lab) | |||
| Atlas Shahamati (Grad student, Soltani lab) | |||
| March 9 | |||
| Romina Ahmadi (Grad student, Granger lab) | |||
| Cove Geary (Grad student, Murray lab) | |||
| Spring 2027 | |||
| April 6 | |||
| Yifan Fang (Grad student, Störmer lab) | |||
| Yuqi Zhang (Grad student, Haxby lab) | |||
| April 20 | |||
| David Gantz (Grad student, Wager lab) | |||
| JaeHeon Lee (Grad student, Murray lab) | |||
| May 4 | External TBA | ||
| May 18 | |||
| Yu-Ching Huang (Grad student, Murray lab) | |||
| Audrey Lai (Grad student, Robertson lab) | |||
| June 1 | |||
| Zizhuang Miao (Grad student, Wager lab) | |||
| Antônio Mello (Grad student, Duchaine lab) |