--Apologies for cross-posting--
Dear all,
You are invited to attend this week's Cognitive Area Seminar talk on *Friday Jan 22, 3:30 - 5 PM (STBIO, Room S3/4*).
The talk will be given by* Nida Latif (PhD Candidate, Psychology, Queens University)*, and is titled "Predictive Mechanisms Involved in Conversational Interaction". For a full abstract, see below dashed line.
There will be a short social at Thompson House after the talk (5:15-6:15 PM) for attendees to converse at greater length with the speaker.
If you are unable to attend this week's talk, there will be more opportunities. Please see our full talk schedule @: http://www.mcgill.ca/psychology/events-colloquia-0/brownbag-series.
If you would like to join the Cognitive Area group mailing list for further notification of our seminars, please go to this link and follow the instructions: http://mx0.psych.mcgill.ca/mailman/listinfo/coggroup. After this week, I will not send notifications to the entire department.
Hope that you are able to attend!
Best, Anna
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*Predictive Mechanisms Involved in Conversational Interaction * Nida Latif, PhD Candidate, Department of Psychology, Queens University, Canada
Engaging in conversation is one the easiest things we do yet cognitively, the processes involved in social interaction are, in principle, exceptionally difficult. When we converse, we must simultaneously comprehend our partner and plan our future utterances all while ensuring that our contributions are timely and appropriate for our audience. One theoretical solution explaining how we interact with such ease despite this complexity is the involvement of mechanisms that allows us to predict our partner during conversation. In this talk, I will present some some work suggesting the contribution of such predictive mechanisms. I will present data indicating that people coordinate both their movement and their language during conversation, suggesting that we must predict others' behavior in order to achieve this coordination. Further, I will present experimental evidence using behavioral and gaze measures that suggest that participants are able to predict the onset of conversational events, both passively and explicitly. I will present the various factors and sources of information that influence this anticipatory behavior.