Doctoral Symposium on Cognivite Science: Beyond Averages - Individual Differences in Cognition (November 12-14,2024)

November 14, 2024 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: How higher cognition emerges from the dynamics of strongly interacting neural populations.
 

Speaker: Gregor Schöner (University of Bochum)

Abstract: Human thinking and acting is generated autonomously, not primarily in reaction to external stimuli. How the neural networks of the brain my autonomously drive the underlying cognitive and behavioral processes is not well understood. Dynamic Field Theory postulates that stable activation patterns emerge from  the dynamics of neural populations dominated by internal recurrent connectivity (interaction). The instantiation of stable states and their subsequent destruction in dynamic instabilities leads to the sequences of processing steps on which all thinking and acting is based.  Cognitive operations can be flexibly employed through binding and coordinate transforms. I’ll illustrate the ideas around a neural dynamic architecture that perceptually grounds nested phrases and acts out phrases that instruct action.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Rotunde 

OR

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/66981348876?pwd=QFWjsNBzW9by39ka42krKzsUai6Nle.1

For more information about the Symposium, see: https://rptu.de/center-for-cognitive-science/events

November 28, 2024 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: Alteration in predictive language processing in different stages of psychosis

Speaker: Franziska Knolle (University of Munich; invited by Thomas Lachmann)

Abstract: Alterations in speech and language represent a core symptom of schizophrenia, the underlying mechanisms and links to positive and negative symptoms are still limited. Here, I am using the predictive coding framework to investigate how predictive language alterations link to positive symptoms. Specifically, I am interested in exploring how an imbalanced weighting of prior knowledge and sensory evidence links to hallucinations and delusions. We developed a novel predictive language task which reflects Bayesian inferential processing. Additionally, we used a Bayesian belief updating model which allows us to extract and simulate the prior weight during language perception, informing us whether individuals rely more on prior knowledge or more on sensory evidence when listening to speech. I will present results from a healthy cohort with schizotypy scores and schizophrenia patients first in acute psychosis and then in psychotic remission. In both cohorts, I will be able to show a link between an overweighting of high-level priors and positive symptoms. Additionally, I will link the results to spectroscopy data.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

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Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/63349030566?pwd=SkpvaWxEMGFqMy9NU0JpM3BiQWtXZz09

December 12, 2024 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: The Prosody-Semantics Tango: Insights from 15 Years of Exploring Emotional Speech Processing Across Populations

Speaker: Boaz M. Ben-David (University of Reichmann; invited by Thomas Lachmann)

Abstract: The Test for Rating Emotions in Speech (T-RES) assesses the interplay of prosody (tone) and semantics (content) in processing emotions in speech. Listeners rate predefined emotions (anger, happiness, sadness) in sentences with both prosodic and semantic emotional content. T-RES versions exist in English, German, Hebrew, Sign Language, and online formats. It has been tested in individuals with tinnitus, cochlear implants, forensic and non-forensic schizophrenia, autism spectrum disorders, intellectual and developmental disabilities, early and late blindness, and deafness, as well as older adults and children. This presentation overviews the tool and key findings: prosody and semantics are separate but not separable dimensions. Young, typically developed adults show prosodic dominance in emotional speech processing across languages, i.e. prosody plays a greater role than semantics. Some groups exhibit reduced prosodic dominance, possibly compensating for auditory and cognitive challenges. Early age childhood exposure to intact spoken language (visual and auditory) is crucial for developing spoken-emotion processing. Group differences in prosody-semantics interactions can lead to communication breakdowns, impacting social interactions.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR 

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/63349030566?pwd=SkpvaWxEMGFqMy9NU0JpM3BiQWtXZz09

January 16, 2025 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: The role of top-down biases in the perception of ambiguous static and biologically dynamic stimuli

Speaker: Antonino Esposito (University of Ferrara; invited by Thomas Lachmann)

Abstract: Visual perception does not produce a snapshot of the external reality. The spatial (i.e., the surrounding environment) and the temporal context (i.e., the recent perceptual history) in which the sensory stimulation occurs influence how visual stimuli are stored and represented. Additionally, individuals’ beliefs, expectations, and internalization of world regularities may reshape the interpretation attributed to a stimulus. This operation constitutes a high-level prior affecting low-level processing stages and is broadly referred to as perceptual bias. Perceptual bias more prominently manifests in situations of perceptual ambiguity, to help the observers reduce the uncertainty. Most research on perceptual bias has focused on how such internal models tune the perception of static ambiguous stimuli, both for simple features, such as orientation and color, and for complex configurations, such as faces and everyday objects. However, none of these studies directly investigated whether the context in which those static stimuli appear may modulate the bias influence. In the first part of the talk, I present a series of studies demonstrating that the perceptual bias for static ambiguously oriented stimuli is tuned by the temporal context in which they are immersed. The results of these studies provide evidence that perceptual bias can be modulated by the quantity and the quality of recent perceptual history, represented at both lower and higher levels of perceptual hierarchy. Similarly to static stimuli, the perception of ambiguous biological movement might be subjected to perceptual bias: individuals might be more prone to attribute different meaning to the same dynamic stimulus depending on their own motor style. In this sense, the so-called Individual Motor Signature (IMS) represents a prior that would bias the perception of others’ movements. In the second part of the talk, I will present some preliminary steps towards the exploration of this hypothesis as well as a possible paradigm to investigate whether the influence of the IMS on motor perception is modulated by the temporal context in which the dynamic stimuli are presented. This new research line might shed light on the modalities with which biological movement is represented in the cognitive system, characterize the perceptual bias within the motor domain, and identify some of its controlling mechanisms.

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR 

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/63349030566?pwd=SkpvaWxEMGFqMy9NU0JpM3BiQWtXZz09

January 30, 2025 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: Priming across bilingual populations, contact settings and linguistic structures: What can it tell us about language change and learning?

Speaker: Helen Engemann (Universtiy of Mannheim; invited by Shanley Allen)

Abstract: In this talk, we will explore links between the phenomenon of priming, i.e., the tendency to repeat structures recently experienced and language change occurring in different bilingual contexts. Recently, cross-linguistic priming has been proposed both as a mechanism of crosslinguistic influence in bilingual individuals (e.g., Serratrice, 2022), but also as a potential mechanism underpinning language change (Kootstra & Muysken, 2019). Some emerging psycholinguistic evidence indicates that priming may play a role in how linguistic innovations come to be accepted and processed in comprehension (Ilen et al., 2024; Karkaletsou, Jacob, & Allen, 2024), but also lead to replications of innovations in speakers’ production (Baroncini et al., 2024; Fernández et al., 2017; Kootstra & Şahin, 2018). As such, cross-linguistic priming may explain how an innovative structure not only enters a language, but also comes to be spread within a community. Nonetheless, many questions remain concerning the role of speakers’ age, the wider societal context (and the role both languages play therein), and the level of grammaticality of the structures involved, which require further investigation. The focus of this talk will be on motion event constructions in German-Italian bilinguals speakers who are either heritage speakers of Italian residing in Germany (low-contact setting) or language-contact setting speakers residing in South-Tyrol in Northern Italy, where both Italian and German are official languages (high-contact setting). Italian is considered a verb-framing (VF) language (Talmy, 2000), typically encoding path information in the main verb and manner (if mentioned at all) in the verbal periphery (e.g., attraversa correndo – ‘(s)he crosses by running’). Nonetheless, Italian also licenses several satellite-framing (SF) patterns, which are canonical with a locative interpretation (e.g., balla dentro – ‘(s)he dances inside’), but innovative when used with a boundary-crossing (BC) reading (i.e., ‘(s)he dances into’). In Study 1 we employed an apparent-time approach using cross-generational evidence from both production and acceptability judgements of such innovative SF constructions in monolingual Italian speakers. Our findings (Michelotti et al., under review) suggest that younger speakers are indeed more accepting of the innovative BC interpretation than older speakers and that they also show a trend towards more frequent production of these innovations. On the basis of these findings, Study 2 employs the priming paradigm to address the question of whether bilingual speakers can be induced to produce innovative form-function mappings after being exposed to German or Italian primes instantiating SF structures. We also examine the role of speakers’ surrounding language setting (low- vs. high-contact) and age. Moreover, we compare effects across two different structures, the innovative SF motion event construction vs. canonical passive structures. We present and discuss current work in progress indicating both within- and acrosslanguage priming effects (Baroncini et al., under review). In study 3, we present work in progress on how cross-linguistic priming could be used educationally for the purpose of L2/3 learning (and teaching) of motion event constructions.  

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR 

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/63349030566?pwd=SkpvaWxEMGFqMy9NU0JpM3BiQWtXZz09

February 06, 2025 at 3:30pm (MEZ - in Person)

Title: Active visual perception and the role of prediction across eye movements

Speaker: Christoph Huber-Huber (University of Trento; invited by Thomas Lachmann)

Abstract: 

Location: RPTU - Campus Kaiserslautern, Building 57, Room 508

OR 

Zoom Link: https://uni-kl-de.zoom-x.de/j/63349030566?pwd=SkpvaWxEMGFqMy9NU0JpM3BiQWtXZz09