Cognitive Brown Bag (CBB)
September 24
- Speaker: Yune-Sang Lee, Ph.D. Candidate, Dartmouth College
- Title: Auditory categorization processing in human brain (Public defense of dissertation proposal)
- Summary: The goal of this proposal is to investigate neural mechanism underlying a range of auditory perceptual phenomena. More specifically, this proposal will address following questions mainly with Multi Voxel Pattern-based fMRI approach.
- Distinct and similar neural representation among auditory object categories (e.g., animate -vs. inanimate)
- The neural basis of melody-pattern recognition (e.g., ascending -vs. descending melodic contour)
- Neural patterns underlying categorical perception of speech phonemes (e.g., /ba/ -vs. /da/ representation)
October 8
October 22
- Speaker: Neil Cohn, Ph.D. Candidate, Tufts University
- Title: What is “Visual Language"?: What comics can tell us about the Mind
- http://www.emaki.net
- Summary: Many theories describing "visual language" have been emerging from
- diverse fields including computer science, communications, and design.
- However, often these approaches rely on metaphoric or folk notions of
- "language" without delving deeper into what Language actually consists of,
- especially on a cognitive level. This talk will present Visual Language
- Theory from the view of the linguistic and cognitive sciences to discuss
- what "language" entails, and thereby exploring just what it means to have a
- literal theory of a graphic modality of language. The result will be a view
- of graphic communication and the capacity for drawing that is embedded
- alongside other mental capacities and divorced from socio-cultural labels
- that stymie its recognition.
November 5
-
Speaker: Barbara Juhasz, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, Wesleyan University,
- Wesleyan EyeLab
- https://wesfiles.wesleyan.edu/labs/eyelab/web/labmembers.htm#bio
- Title: Sensory Experience Ratings (SER): A New Word Recognition Variable
- Summary: In this talk, I will describe the development of a new word
- recognition variable, Sensory Experience Ratings (SER). SER indexes how
- evocative of a sensory experience a particular word is to a reader. It is
- grounded in the embodied cognition view that our cognitive processes are a
- product of our sensory and perceptual experiences. The relationship of this
- variable to existing word recognition variables, such as word frequency,
- imageability, and age-of-acquisition will be discussed. Two large-scale
- regression studies on over 2,000 words will also be described. The results
- of these studies demonstrate that SER accounts for unique variance in
- lexical decision performance over and above other word recognition
- variables. Finally, preliminary evidence that SER influences fixation
- durations in reading will also be presented. Implications for models of word
- recognition will be explored.
November 19
- Speaker: Maria Mody, Ph.D., Assistant Professor Radiology, Harvard Medical School; Developmental Language and Reading Research Laboratory
- http://www.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/lrrl/maria.html
- Title: Brain dynamics of the language basis in developmental reading disability
- Summary: Over the years, the role of language in reading disability has gained increasing attention. The heterogeneity of reading disabilities has raised questions about the relationship between, and contributions of various components of language to development and disorders of reading in young children and adolescent readers. In a series of experiments, we exploit the good spatial resolution and excellent temporal resolution of magnetoencephalography (MEG) to dissect phonological-semantic- syntactic relations in spoken and written language in children with and without reading impairments. Convergent findings from a variety of tasks, while validating the critical role of phonological processing in reading disability, point to the importance of top-down and bottom-up interactions among language processes within the reading network in determining clinical outcomes.
December 3
