coggroup November 2015

coggroup@mx1.psych.mcgill.ca

1 participants
6 discussions

[Coggroup] REMINDER: Cognitive Area Seminar Nov 27th: Nikos Vergis "Effects of Face on the construction of speaker meaning"
by Esther Schott 27 Nov '15

27 Nov '15

Hi, Just a reminder that the Cognitive Area Seminar is about to start at 3:30pm in S3/4. There will be Pizza! Esther ** apologies for multiple postings ** (1) Reminder of the McGill Cognitive Area Seminar this week (2) Journal Blitz in Thomson House at 5pm on Friday (after the Cognitive Area Seminar) (1) This week, for the Cognitive Area Seminar in Psychology, we're happy to have Nikos Vergis, PostDoc in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (SCSD), give a talk: Friday, November 27th, 15h30-17h00 S3/4, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Dr. Penfield Effects of Face on the construction of speaker meaning Nikos Vergis Face (Goffman 1955, 1959, 1967), the public self-image that individuals project in interaction, has been proposed (Brown & Levinson 1978/1987) as a social psychological principle that motivates the deviation from rational (Gricean) communication. Yet, standard formulations of this principle fail to account for empirical phenomena in which, despite the fact that no Gricean Maxims are flouted, communicators still convey interpersonal meanings (e.g. affiliation) that seem to be at odds with what is said. In this talk, I suggest that Face be treated as a separate source of information from which implicatures can be calculated without recourse to flouts of Maxims. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 confirmed that flouts of the Gricean Maxim of Quality produced inferences in the predicted direction. Experiment 2 manipulated Face concerns in addition to flouts of Quality revealing that perception of speaker meaning is affected as a function of (strong or minimal) face sensitivities. (2) After the talk, we will gather in Thomson House (3650 Rue McTavish) for the Journal Blitz; join us to tell us about an article you have read recently, hear about what others have read, and discuss (over drinks and nachos). The seminar and Journal Blitz is open to students, faculty, post-docs, and whoever else who is interested. Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Esther ------ Esther Schott Graduate Student, MIDC Department of Psychology McGill University http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/midccdem/ ------ The schedule for upcoming talks in the Cognitive Area Seminar can be found: https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added to the listserv for the Cognitive Area Seminar, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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[Coggroup] Reminder of Cognitive Area Seminar: Nikos Vergis "Effects of Face on the construction of speaker meaning"
by Esther Schott 23 Nov '15

23 Nov '15

** apologies for multiple postings ** (1) Reminder of the McGill Cognitive Area Seminar this week (2) Journal Blitz in Thomson House at 5pm on Friday (after the Cognitive Area Seminar) (1) This week, for the Cognitive Area Seminar in Psychology, we're happy to have Nikos Vergis, PostDoc in the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders (SCSD), give a talk: Friday, November 27th, 15h30-17h00 S3/4, Stewart Biology Building, 1205 Dr. Penfield Effects of Face on the construction of speaker meaning Nikos Vergis Face (Goffman 1955, 1959, 1967), the public self-image that individuals project in interaction, has been proposed (Brown & Levinson 1978/1987) as a social psychological principle that motivates the deviation from rational (Gricean) communication. Yet, standard formulations of this principle fail to account for empirical phenomena in which, despite the fact that no Gricean Maxims are flouted, communicators still convey interpersonal meanings (e.g. affiliation) that seem to be at odds with what is said. In this talk, I suggest that Face be treated as a separate source of information from which implicatures can be calculated without recourse to flouts of Maxims. Two experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 confirmed that flouts of the Gricean Maxim of Quality produced inferences in the predicted direction. Experiment 2 manipulated Face concerns in addition to flouts of Quality revealing that perception of speaker meaning is affected as a function of (strong or minimal) face sensitivities. (2) After the talk, we will gather in Thomson House (3650 Rue McTavish) for the Journal Blitz; join us to tell us about an article you have read recently, hear about what others have read, and discuss (over drinks and nachos). The seminar and Journal Blitz is open to students, faculty, post-docs, and whoever else who is interested. Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Esther ------ Esther Schott Graduate Student, MIDC Department of Psychology McGill University http://www.psych.mcgill.ca/labs/midccdem/ ------ The schedule for upcoming talks in the Cognitive Area Seminar can be found: https://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added to the listserv for the Cognitive Area Seminar, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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[Coggroup] REMINDER Cognitive Area Seminar Nov 13th 2015
by Esther Schott 13 Nov '15

13 Nov '15

Hi, Just a reminder of the talk today at 3:30pm (there will be pizza, too!). ***Apologies for multiple postings*** Reminder of the Cognitive Area Seminar this week: The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations: Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning. Samuel Veissière McGill University (see below for abstract) Friday, November 13th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S 3/4 Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks, Esther Full Info on Dr. Veissière's talk: The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations: Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning. The combined efforts of developmental psychology, the philosophy of mind, and anthropology (particularly linguistic and cognitive anthropology) have greatly advanced our understanding of the invariant features of human cognition that give rise to language, culture, and the manipulation of symbols in phylogeny and ontogeny. But our accounts of the ontological and epistemological status of representations (what they are, and how they are learned) in the so-called symbol-grounding problem rely on just-so stories. We know that joint intentionality in social learning enables neurotypical humans to navigate complex semiotic worlds by inferring conventionally and situationally appropriate responses to implicitly rule-governed contexts. But we don't know how those implicit cultural grammars are learned, and we don't know what they are. We know that there are, in Sperber's terms, widely shared and durable epidemics of unrepresented beliefs. Thus, we know that human children across cultures acquire implicit group biases that often differ from their caregivers' and educators' reflective beliefs, but are consistent with the dominant ideologies found in their culture at large (e.g., both non-minority and minority children in North America express preference for non-minority phenotypes). While different theories of social cognition have sought to shed light on these mechanisms, they have remained silent on the onto-epistemic status of representations. Thus, in their critique of theory-theory and simulation accounts of mindreading, enactivists claim that representations are grounded in largely automatic, embodied and affective responses learned through imitation and enacted in context. The recent predictive coding account, in turn, offers that human brains generate models of the world by inferring and extrapolating from past experience. But these models shed no light on what it is that brains, bodies, and modes of affect are responding to or predicting. What, after all, are representations, when most of 'them' cannot be pointed to, verbalized, or consciously accessed by humans? In this talk, I propose an ontologically pluralist account of the ontogeny of representations that draws on multi-system theories of social cognition, ecological and phenomenological approaches to perception, Peircian semiotics, and language socialization paradigms in the ethnographic study of language acquisition. Theorizing public representations as affordances stabilized in ontogeny, I propose to differentiate between iconic (first order), indexical (second-order), and symbolic (third order) affordances that require inferences from different forms of perspective-taking, and argue that symbolic representations are successfully learned when they acquire near-iconic affordance status through recursivity. I conclude with notes and queries for a mixed-method approach to the study of representations in social learning. You are receiving this message because you are a member of a listserv for the McGill Psychology Department Cognitive Area Seminar. The speakers for this semester are listed here: http://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added or removed from the list, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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[Coggroup] Cognitive Area Seminar Nov 13th 2015: "Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning"
by Esther Schott 10 Nov '15

10 Nov '15

***Apologies for multiple postings*** Reminder of the Cognitive Area Seminar this week: The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations: Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning. Samuel Veissière McGill University (see below for abstract) Friday, November 13th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S 3/4 Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks, Esther Full Info on Dr. Veissière's talk: The Elephant Outside the Room, or the Hard Problem of Representations: Toward an Eco-Semiotic Account of the Ontogeny of Affordances in Social Learning. The combined efforts of developmental psychology, the philosophy of mind, and anthropology (particularly linguistic and cognitive anthropology) have greatly advanced our understanding of the invariant features of human cognition that give rise to language, culture, and the manipulation of symbols in phylogeny and ontogeny. But our accounts of the ontological and epistemological status of representations (what they are, and how they are learned) in the so-called symbol-grounding problem rely on just-so stories. We know that joint intentionality in social learning enables neurotypical humans to navigate complex semiotic worlds by inferring conventionally and situationally appropriate responses to implicitly rule-governed contexts. But we don't know how those implicit cultural grammars are learned, and we don't know what they are. We know that there are, in Sperber's terms, widely shared and durable epidemics of unrepresented beliefs. Thus, we know that human children across cultures acquire implicit group biases that often differ from their caregivers' and educators' reflective beliefs, but are consistent with the dominant ideologies found in their culture at large (e.g., both non-minority and minority children in North America express preference for non-minority phenotypes). While different theories of social cognition have sought to shed light on these mechanisms, they have remained silent on the onto-epistemic status of representations. Thus, in their critique of theory-theory and simulation accounts of mindreading, enactivists claim that representations are grounded in largely automatic, embodied and affective responses learned through imitation and enacted in context. The recent predictive coding account, in turn, offers that human brains generate models of the world by inferring and extrapolating from past experience. But these models shed no light on what it is that brains, bodies, and modes of affect are responding to or predicting. What, after all, are representations, when most of 'them' cannot be pointed to, verbalized, or consciously accessed by humans? In this talk, I propose an ontologically pluralist account of the ontogeny of representations that draws on multi-system theories of social cognition, ecological and phenomenological approaches to perception, Peircian semiotics, and language socialization paradigms in the ethnographic study of language acquisition. Theorizing public representations as affordances stabilized in ontogeny, I propose to differentiate between iconic (first order), indexical (second-order), and symbolic (third order) affordances that require inferences from different forms of perspective-taking, and argue that symbolic representations are successfully learned when they acquire near-iconic affordance status through recursivity. I conclude with notes and queries for a mixed-method approach to the study of representations in social learning. You are receiving this message because you are a member of a listserv for the McGill Psychology Department Cognitive Area Seminar. The speakers for this semester are listed here: http://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added or removed from the list, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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[Coggroup] REMINDER Cognitive Area Seminar Nov 6th 2015: "Automated Interpretation of Idioms and Their Variants"
by Esther Schott 06 Nov '15

06 Nov '15

Hi, Just a reminder of the talk today at 3:30pm (there will be pizza, too!). ***Apologies for multiple postings*** Friday, November 6th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S 3/4 Reminder of the Cognitive Area Seminar this week: Automated Interpretation of Idioms and Their Variants Fernando Sa-Pereira McGill University Idioms pose an ongoing but stubborn challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). An idiom is taken here to mean a relatively fixed multiword expression whose meaning is different from what the literal meaning of its components would suggest, as in "that name rings a bell". The figurative nature of idioms is one aspect that makes idioms difficult for machines to interpret. To further complicate the problem, idioms often appear in some variant form as well, as in "it rings a faint bell". Corpus studies show that three out of ten sentences contain an idiomatic expression, and one half of idioms can appear in variant forms. So NLP applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis and information retrieval, must deal with idioms and their variants or misinterpret a large portion of the data. We tackle this problem by borrowing approaches used in distributional semantics, that is, methods to create mathematical representations of individual words based on the contexts in which the words appear. Since words that appear in similar contexts have related meanings, these representations capture some of the semantic information of a word. Correctly combining these representations can do the same for idiomatic expressions. In this presentation, I will provide a brief introduction to distributional semantics, and then show how we use these techniques to build representations of idiomatic expressions. I will then show how such representations can be deployed in three tasks: paraphrasing idiomatic expressions; distinguishing literal and figurative uses of these phrases (e.g., did she remember something or did she ring an actual bell?); and suggesting an appropriate idiomatic expression for a given context. Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks, Esther You are receiving this message because you are a member of a listserv for the McGill Psychology Department Cognitive Area Seminar. The speakers for this semester are listed here: http://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added or removed from the list, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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[Coggroup] Cognitive Area Seminar Nov 6th 2015: "Automated Interpretation of Idioms and Their Variants"
by Esther Schott 02 Nov '15

02 Nov '15

***Apologies for multiple postings*** Reminder of the Cognitive Area Seminar this week: Automated Interpretation of Idioms and Their Variants Fernando Sa-Pereira McGill University Idioms pose an ongoing but stubborn challenge in Natural Language Processing (NLP). An idiom is taken here to mean a relatively fixed multiword expression whose meaning is different from what the literal meaning of its components would suggest, as in "that name rings a bell". The figurative nature of idioms is one aspect that makes idioms difficult for machines to interpret. To further complicate the problem, idioms often appear in some variant form as well, as in "it rings a faint bell". Corpus studies show that three out of ten sentences contain an idiomatic expression, and one half of idioms can appear in variant forms. So NLP applications, such as machine translation, sentiment analysis and information retrieval, must deal with idioms and their variants or misinterpret a large portion of the data. We tackle this problem by borrowing approaches used in distributional semantics, that is, methods to create mathematical representations of individual words based on the contexts in which the words appear. Since words that appear in similar contexts have related meanings, these representations capture some of the semantic information of a word. Correctly combining these representations can do the same for idiomatic expressions. In this presentation, I will provide a brief introduction to distributional semantics, and then show how we use these techniques to build representations of idiomatic expressions. I will then show how such representations can be deployed in three tasks: paraphrasing idiomatic expressions; distinguishing literal and figurative uses of these phrases (e.g., did she remember something or did she ring an actual bell?); and suggesting an appropriate idiomatic expression for a given context. Friday, November 6th, 15h30-17h00 Stewart Biology Building, S 3/4 Please forward this message to your students and other interested parties. Thanks, Esther You are receiving this message because you are a member of a listserv for the McGill Psychology Department Cognitive Area Seminar. The speakers for this semester are listed here: http://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series If you would like to be added or removed from the list, please go to the link below and follow the instructions. http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup

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coggroup November 2015