2006-2007

January 26 -- Neil Charness, Florida State University

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: TBA

February 16 -- Richard Lewis, University of Michigan

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: The Surprising Nature of Working Memory in Language Comprehension

March 23 -- Stephen Benning, Vanderbilt University

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: TBA

March 30 -- Bobby Naemi, Laughery Lecture, Rice University

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Extreme response style: Personality and Measurement Issues.

2005-2006

November 4 -- Eddie Harmon-Jones, Texas A&M

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Toward an understanding of the emotive functions of asymmetrical frontal cortical activity

November 18 -- Camille Peres, Laughery Lecture, U of H Clear Lake

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Dimensions of Sound in Auditory Displays: The Effects of Redundant Dimensions

December 12 -- tba

Location: McMurtry Auditorium

Time: 2:00 PM

December 13 -- Diane M. Beck, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 4:00 PM

Title: Capacity, Context and Neural Competition

December 15 -- tba

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 11:00 AM

January 11 -- tba

Location: McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Time: 3:45 - 5:00 PM

January 13 -- Karen DeValois, UC Berkeley

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: The Appearance of Moving Images

The blurry images of moving objects often appear to be less blurred than they actually are. We asked whether the perceptual changes underlying motion deblurring were equivalent to replacing the missing high-spatial-frequency components, increasing the contrast of all of the remaining frequency components, or selectively increasing the contrast of the higher frequency components (thus effectively whitening the spectrum). The latter proved to be the case. We have also examined the effects of selective spatial and temporal filtering applied to moving images. I will demonstrate how, by appropriate filter selection, we can significantly compress the amount of information transmitted with little effect or no on perception. I will also describe some rather unexpected roles that color can play in the perception of motion.

January 19 -- tba

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 4:00 PM

January 23 -- tba

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 4:00 PM

January 27 -- Michael Vitevitch, U. of Kansas

Location: Humanities 117

Time: 3:00 PM

Title: Phonological neighbors in a small world (network): What can graph theory tell us about the mental lexicon?

Sponored jointly with the linguistics department

Graph theory has been used to mathematically describe the general principles that govern the development and organization of complex systems, such as the relationship among web pages on the internet and collaborations among scientists. Several analyses examined phonological word-forms in the mental lexicon of children and adults in the context of graph theory. The results show that the phonological word-forms in the mental lexicon of adults exhibit the characteristics of small-world networks. Some of these characteristics were not present at earlier points in time (at 16- and 18-months of age), suggesting that the lexicon may undergo significant restructuring and self-organization over time. The implications of viewing the lexicon from a graph theoretic perspective for word learning and lexical access are discussed. Viewing complex cognitive systems from this perspective may also connect Psychology and Cognitive Science to a more universal theory that explains how many complex systems found in the real world are formed.

January 31 -- Amir Raz , Columbia University

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 4:00 PM

Title: Attention, Suggestion, and Conflict Reduction in the Human Brain

The role of suggestion is understudied in cognitive science. Using
attention as an experimental vehicle, this talk will outline converging
evidence (i.e., behavioral, neuroimaging, genetic, and optical)
addressing the influence of suggestion on brain function. Many studies
of selective attention have proposed that conflict monitoring involves
the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). We previously showed that a
specific hypnotic suggestion reduces involuntary conflict and alters
information processing in highly hypnotizable individuals.
Hypothesizing that such conflict reduction would be associated with
decreased ACC activation we combined neuroimaging methods to provide
high temporal and spatial resolution and studied highly- and
less-hypnotizable participants both with and without a suggestion to
interpret visual words as nonsense strings. Functional magnetic
resonance imaging (fMRI) data revealed that under posthypnotic
suggestion, both ACC and visual areas presented reduced activity in
highly hypnotizable persons compared with either no-suggestion or
less-hypnotizable controls. Scalp electrode recordings in highly
hypnotizable subjects also showed reductions in posterior activation
under suggestion, indicating visual system alterations. Our findings
illuminate how suggestion affects cognitive control by modulating
activity in specific brain areas, including early visual modules, and
provide a more scientific account relating the neural effects of
suggestion to placebo.

February 3 -- Sheldon Zedeck, UC Berkeley

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Assessing and Predicting Lawyering Effectiveness: Trials and Tribulations.

The basic predictors used for admissions to law schools in the U.S. are a combination of the Law School Admissions Test (LSAT) and undergraduate grade point average (UGPA). The combined index of LSAT and UGPA explains approximately 25% of the variance in first year law school grades. The project that I will describe (now in its 5th year) is one that focuses on (1) the identification and development of measures that can be used to assess lawyering effectiveness (assessing practicing attorneys); (2) the identification and development of "new and different" predictors that might have value in law school admissions and can complement LSAT and UGPA; and (3) a strategy for implementing and concluding a validation paradigm to determine the effectiveness of the developed procedures.

February 10-- Gary K. Beauchamp, Monell Chemical Senses Center

Location: Duncan Hall 1064

Time: 2:00 PM

Title: Chemical Signaling of Individual Identity.

Just as the sight can provide an observer with a vast amount of information about another individual, including its sex, age, individual identity, emotional state and even health status, so too can an individual’s odor. This information can then modulate behavioral and physiological responses to that individual including mate choice and parent-offspring recognition. For mice, and probably many other species including humans, an individual’s olfactory individual identity (its odortype) is coded in part by a pattern of volatile compounds regulated by genes in the major histocompatibility complex, a string of linked genes intimately involved in immune function. In this presentation I will provide an overview of work on genetically regulated chemical signaling of individual identity in the mouse and will describe some of our ongoing work on the same topic in humans.

February 17 -- Kurt Kraiger, Colorado State

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Learner Control: Does it Matter and
Do We Know it When We See It?

Learner control refers to the extent to which a learner can affect his or her own learning experience through control over features of the learning environment such as the path, pace, and/or contingencies of instruction. While many learning theorists have recognized the potential benefits of learner control, past quantitative reviews have shown little or no positive effect of control on learning or reactions to training. Nonetheless, understanding and optimizing learner control is becoming increasingly important as more organizations move towards self-directed learning in web-based environments.

This presentation focuses on four recent investigations related to learner control. In the first, a meta-analysis by Kraiger and Jerden (in press) found no overall effects for learner control on learning or trainee reactions. However, effect sizes were positively correlated with year of study. Similarly, a broader meta-analysis of web-based training studies by Sitzmann, Kraiger, Stewart, and Wisher (in review) found that learner control successfully moderated learning in online learning environments. Finally, two more recent studies (Kraiger & Park, 2005; Huang & Kraiger, in progress) investigate the relationship between actual levels of learner control and learners’ perceptions of control. Preliminary results suggest that while learners can detect differences between high and low control, it is also the case that perceived control may be influenced by individual differences including cognitive ability and self-efficacy.

February 24 -- Jim Tanaka, University of Victoria

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: The making of object and face experts: Behavioral and neurophysiological correlates of perceptual expertise

March 3 --Jay Gottfried, Northwestern University Medical School

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: A Smell of Brilliantine and Crème de Menthe and Soft-Centered Chocolates”, or, Odor Quality Perception in the Human Brain

Why does one airborne organic compound “smell” like chocolate, and another like cheese? How is odor quality encoded in the brain? Animal studies indicate that specific molecular determinants of an odor, such as functional group and carbon chain length, shape the response properties in olfactory sensory neurons and the olfactory bulb, leading to the idea that neural representations of odor quality are reflected in ensemble activity encoding complex molecular configurations. However, these structure-based “bottom-up” models of odor perception conflict with a growing number of studies suggesting that even elementary aspects of olfactory processing are highly contingent on learning and experience. In this presentation I will discuss recent human psychophysical and neuroimaging data showing that at the level of primary olfactory (piriform) cortex and orbitofrontal cortex, neural codes of odor quality are independent of simple molecular configurations and can be rapidly modulated by olfactory perceptual learning. These findings provide direct evidence for a more synthetic, experience-dependent basis of odor quality coding in the human brain..

March 24 --John Anderson , Carnegie Mellon University

Location: SH 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: The Role of Declarative Memory in a Cognitive Architecture

To understand declarative memory it is necessary to understand the role it plays in a cognitive architecture. Declarative memory contains the knowledge that gives each of us our identities and gives us the ability to behave flexibly in the world. Unfortunately, our brains impose severe limitations on our ability to maintain memories in highly flexible forms. The basic characteristics of declarative memory can be seen as arising from the need to balance this structural limitation against this functional need. After discussing the convergence of behavioral and brain imaging data on this conclusion, the talk looks at some examples of the pervasive application of these flexible declarative memories.

March 31 --Donna Desforges, Sam Houston State University

Location: TBA

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: TBA

April 21 --Dan Wegner , Harvard University

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Authorship Processing: How Do You Know That Your Actions Are Your Own?

Although it would be nice to think that you always know what youre doing, action authorship can be confusing. In psychopathologies such as schizophrenia, depression, and dissociative identity disorder, the sense of authorship for ones actions and even thoughts can be profoundly disturbed. And in unusual circumstances such as hypnosis, ouija board spelling, and facilitated communication, many people can be mystified about whether an action is theirs or belongs to another agent. The psychological study of the experience of conscious will suggests that the perception of authorship follows from attention to a number of authorship indicators, and this talk focuses on experiments in which authorship experiences are altered by the manipulation of these indicators. Phenomena such as vicarious agency, effort misattribution, and apparent mental causation reveal that people can sometimes easily believe that they are the authors of actions they did not cause, or that they are not authors when they are in fact responsible.




Jointly sponsored by Psychology and Cognitive Science

2004-2005

September 1-- Rick Wilson Rice University

Location: McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Time: 12:00 PM

Title: "Never Judge a Book by its Cover: Beauty and Expectations in a Trust Game"

September 9-- Steve Kozlowski Michigan State University

Location: Kyle Morrow Room, Library

Time: 4:00 PM

Title: Active Learning: Enhancing Self-Regulatory Processes, Learning, and Adaptive Performance

Active learning refers to a set of techniques designed to actively engage learners, attention and effort. Although the techniques differ in many ways, they also share common underpinnings -- they stimulate self-regulation, engage motivation, and prompt emotion management. It is important to understand the nature of, and psychological processes that underlie, active learning because training is increasingly delivered via computer technology and more of the control and responsibility for learning is being shifted to the learner. My presentation will provide an overview of a program of research that my students, colleagues, and I have pursued in this area over the last several years. I will focus on our theoretical framework, research on the design of active learning techniques, and more recent efforts to trace the psychological pathways by which active learning techniques exert effects on regulatory processes, learning, performance, and adaptability. I will close with brief highlights of the future direction of this work.

October 8-- Bill Maki Texas Tech

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 3:30

Title: Judgements of Associative Memory in a Multiple-Trace Memory Model

When given the word GUM, the chances are very slim (~5%) of observing a response to BUBBLE. Yet, when asked to rate the liklihood of BUBBLE being given in response to GUM, most people respond with high estimates (~68%). Several experiments rule out uninteresting explanations for this discrepancy and consistently reveal a linear relationship between judged associative memory (JAM) and free-association (FA): JAM ~= 50 + 0.40 * FA. A computer similation model (Minerva 3) produces similar functions with high intercepts and shallow slopes. The overestimation thus seems to be a natural memory phenomenon and not a judgemental artifact.

October 15-- Randy Batsell Jones Graduate School of Management, Rice University

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: On the Use and Application of Tversky's Elimination-By-Aspects Model of Choice: Results and Insights from Three Studies

In 1972, Amos Tversky generalized a model of choice first proposed by R. Duncan Luce in 1959. Because of difficulties in parameter estimation, Tversky's Elimination-By-Aspects (EBA) model remained unapplied in any context for 31 years. In a 2003 Journal of Mathematical Psychology paper, Batsell, Polking, Cramer, and Miller proved the existence of a linear relationship between parameters in the EBA model and observable probabilities of choice. This, in turn, meant that least-squares can be used to estimate the EBA parameters. This presentation describes the EBA model and demonstrates valuable applications in the context of both snack food choice and political choice. The political choice context is based on the Presidential preferences of a nation-level internet sample of 1,112 likely voters indicating their choice for President in the 2004 primaries. Applications of EBA have revealed it to be a very powerful model, much more parsimonious than was previously thought, and capable of providing valuable insights into choice and competitive structure.

"A New Approach for Capturing and Portraying the Competitive Structure of a Market: An Application To The Bush-Kerry-Nader Presidential Contest" has been published in Review of Marketing Science.

October 25-- Howard Weiss Purdue University

Location: McMurtry Auditorium, Duncan Hall

Time: 11:45 AM

Title: Emotional Experiences in Work Settings: Past, Present and Future: (In about 50 minutes)

Even the smallest amount of reflection will convince anyone that organizations are settings of emotional intensity. If emotions are generated by appraisals of the reaching or impending of important personal goals or values, then where is this more likely to occur than in work settings? So, one would think that the study of emotions at work would have been a core topic of work psychology throughout the history of work psychology. In fact, the study of true affective experiences has only recently generated real interest. In his presentation, Howard Weiss, Professor of Psychological Sciences at Purdue University, will discuss his own program of research on emotions and work experience, using his Affective Events Theory as the organizing framework. He will also integrate that research with historical and current trends in the study of emotion in work settings.

October 29-- Rice Cognitive Sciences Program Coloquium
H. Clark Barrett, Department of Anthropology, UCLA

Location: 117 Humanities Building

Time: 3:30 - 5:00 PM

Title: Do Children Have an Inate Concept of Death?

Despite many years of research, there is still uncertainty about what children understand about death, and when. Here I describe research that suggests that at least one part of the death concept appears to develop reliably by age 4 in children from very different cultures: the understanding that death entails the cessation of the ability to act. I discuss these findings in light of the debate about innate knowledge, and suggest a framework for thinking about the development of the core knowledge based on the notion of evolved developmental targets.

 

November 5-- Madeline Campbell Rice University
Laughery Award Lecture

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Taming Orienting Tasks

January 21 -- Lee Osterhout University of Washington

Location: Sewall Hall 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: "ERPs as tools for investigating language processing and language learning"

Our species has a truly remarkable facility for using language, but remarkably little facility for intuitively understanding how we do it. To figure that out, we need sophisticated methods of investigation. One such method involves recording the brain's electrical activity from the scalp while people read or listen to language. We have used this method to investigate on-line language comprehension, second-language learning, and even linguistically encoded social stereotypes. Our results support some conventional beliefs (for example, that syntax and semantics are neurobiologically distinct) but not others (for example, the belief that syntax always drives sentence processing, or that adult second-language learning is uniformly slow). I will respectfully propose some revisions to conventional views of how we process a first language and learn a second one.

February 25-- Kevin R.Murphy Pennsylvania State University

Location: Sewall Hall

Time: TBA

Title: Why aren't personality measures more useful for making high-stakes decisions?

For decades, applied psychologists believed that personality measures were not useful for making high-stakes decisions (e.g., personnel selection), but in recent years enthusiasm for these measures has grown. Empirical evidence for the value of these measures, however, is still quite discouraging. Explanations for the growing popularity of personality measures and for the continuing failure of these measures to achieve their promise are examined.

March 14-- Steve Motowidlo, University of Minnesota

Location: McMurtry Auditorium (Duncan Hall)

Time: 11:30 am - 12:45 pm

Title: Effects of Personality Traits on Judgements about Behavioral Effectiveness

This presentation will introduce the concept of implicit trait policy (ITP) which is a person's belief about the importance of a personality trait for determining behavioral effectiveness. It is the correlation calculated in a series of behaviors for a single individual between the degree to which a behavior expresses a personality trait such as agreeableness and the individual's judgment about how effective the behavior is. The ITP hypothesis is that this correlation varies directly with the individual's own standing on the personality trait. Thus, agreeable people, for instance, are predicted to believe that agreeableness is correlated more strongly with effectiveness than disagreeable people do. The ITP hypothesis is essentially a specific version of the accentuation hypothesis descussed by Tajfel (1957), Eiser & van der Pligt (1984), Lambert & Wedell (1991) and others. The presentation will summarize results of several studies of the ITP hypothesis that a) explain why some traits are correlated with procedural knowledge scores on situational judgment tests, b) show it is possible to tap variance in a personality trait implicitly by asking people to judge the effectiveness of behaviors that vary in the degree to which they express the trait and c) explain why some people are able to rate job performance more accurately than others.

March 18-- Isabel Gauthier Vanderbilt University

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Using old Greebles to teach new tricks

The Perceptual Expertise Network (PEN) is a group of cognitive neuroscientists working collaboratively since 2001 to explore how "different" brains approach object recognition and categorization. I will report on our efforts to study the ability of individuals with prosopagnosia to aquire expertise with novel objects ("Greebles"). Three training case studies suggest as much heterogeneity in prosopagnosics' ability to learn novel objects as there is in their face and object recognition difficulties. However, one commonality across all three studies is that, regardless of whether or not they can reach the criterion for Greeble expertise, they do not seem to recruit holistic strategies when processing Greebles. I will relate these findings to recent work by Duchaine and colleagues, in which they claim that an individual with congenital prosopagnosia was able to learn Greebles as well as control subjects. Together these studies represent a new step towards controlled studies of learning in visual agnosia, taking us beyond conjectures and anecdotal evidence and forcing us to rethink the way we think about expertise in normal observers.

Suggested reading: Duchaine BC, Dingle K, Butterworth E, Nakayama K (2004). Normal greeble learning in a severe case of developmental prosopagnosia. Neuron, 43(4), 469-73.

April 1-- William Gehring University of Michigan

Location: Sewall Hall 309

Time: 3:30 pm

Title: The Processing of Negative Events in the Medial Frontal Cortex

Detecting when things go wrong is a critical function of the human brain.  When people make an error, experience conflict, or suffer a loss, it is important that they recognize the problem quickly and take appropriate steps to recover.  Evidence from studies of the error-related negativity (ERN), a component of the event-related brain potential, suggests that a rapid evaluation of negative events occurs in the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC).  In this talk I first review the evidence for theories that the ERN reflects activity involved in detecting errors or response conflict.  One line of research testing these theories has shown that ERN-like activity occurs in response to monetary losses and error feedback stimuli.  An influential model builds on the earlier theories and postulates that the ERN and the feedback-related response are both generated when the anterior cingulate cortex receives a dopaminergic error signal indicating that an event is "worse than expected."  The work from my laboratory paints a more complicated picture.  First, our evidence suggests that the ERN and the loss-related activity are not identical.   Moreover, favorable outcomes (such as losses that a subject avoided) can elicit relatively large feedback-related negativities. Finally, our data show that the probability of a negative outcome and its negative value both affect the feedback-related activity, pointing to a need for theories to specify exactly how probability and value combine.  Taken together, these studies suggest that theories must be amended to accommodate the multiple computations and neural structures that give rise to the ERN and feedback-related responses.

Suggested Reading: Gehring, W.J., & Willoughby, A.R. (2002). The medial frontal cortex and the rapid processing of monetary gains and losses. Science, 295(5563), 2279-2282.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~wgehring/papers/GehringWilloughby_2002_Science.pd

May 6 -- Eddie-Harmon-Jones, Texas A&M

Location: TBA

Time: TBA

Title: TBA

2003-2004

September 12-- Winfred Arthur Texas A&M University

Location: Kyle Morrow Room, Fondren Library

Time: 4:00 PM

Title: A Comparative Evaluation of Predictors in Personnel Selection

September 19-- Daniel H. Mathalon, Ph.D., M.D. Yale University

Location: Sewall Hall, 301

Time: 3:30 PM

Title: Error Monitoring Dysfunction in Schizophrenia: ERP and fMRI evidence

November 13-- Margaret Livingstone, Harvard Medical School

Location: Kyle Morrow Room of Fondren Library

Time: 1:00-2:30 PM, followed by reception

Title: Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing

November 13-- Special Event

November 20-- Special Event

November 21-- Lawrence Hirschfield, University of Michigan

Location: Humanities Building, 117

Time: 4:00 PM

Title: Does the autistic child have a theory of society?

November 24-- Special Event

December 2-- Special Event

January 19-- Special Event

February 6 -- Jeff Schall, Vanderbilt University

Baylor-Rice Neuroscience Seminar Series

Location: Alkek Building, Room N315, Baylor College of Medicine

Time: 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM

Website of Jeff Schall