2025
Oct. 21. 15.00-16.00
Exploring Companion Robots for Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis in Specialised Dental Care
Sofia Thunberg, Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers
Location: Room F6, Psykologen, Haraldsgatan 1
Abstract: As robotic technologies become increasingly integrated into care settings, it is critical to assess their impact within the complexity of real-world contexts. This talk will present on an exploratory study examining the introduction of a robot cat for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) in a specialised dental facility. Children with ASD often face challenges in dental care, including anxiety, sensory sensitivities, and difficulty with collaboration. This study investigates if a robot cat can provide psychosocial support to the patients and foster collaboration with the dental hygienist. Ten patients, aged 5-10, participated in the 12-months study, each undergoing one baseline session without the robot and 3-5 subsequent visits with the robot, yielding 37 sessions of video data. Reflexive thematic analysis revealed three key themes: the robot cat can 'enhance training and treatment', robot cats can serve as a 'beneficial but a non-essential tool', and robot cats can sometimes 'hinder progress in training and treatment'. These findings highlight significant individual variation in how the robot was experienced, shaped by context, timing, and emotional state. The robot's role was not universally positive or passive; its effectiveness depended on how it was integrated into personalised care strategies by the dental hygienist, guardians, and the patients themselves. This study underscores the importance of tailoring technological interventions in care, advocating for cautious, context-sensitive use rather than one-size-fits-all solutions.
Sep. 16, 15.00-16.00
Dynamic Profiles of Cognition: Measuring Contextual Flexibility
William Hedley Thompson, Dept. of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg
Location: Room B1 132, House B, Pedagogen
Abstract: All areas of cognition, from perception and memory to decision-making and moral judgement, show powerful contextual effects. These effects have been studied in traditions from ecological psychology, which emphasizes affordances, to dynamic systems theory, which models cognition as self-organizing adaptable systems. Yet despite decades of work, key questions remain overlooked or underinvestigated: When one cognitive faculty adapts to context, how much does it impact others? Do cognitive faculties tend to switch together, or is this different for each individual? What determines an individual’s ability to flexibly shift across contexts?
Systematically studying context is notoriously difficult: it is multi-dimensional, dynamic, and hard to capture experimentally. In this talk, I present the beginnings of a new research program that pushes toward a unified framework of contextual cognition. The key step is methodological: developing ways to ecologically quantify contextual shifts in daily life. I will outline this framework, show our initial results, and sketch where this field is heading. Finally I will discuss how and why this work has implications for areas such as resilience, learning, and neurodivergence.
About the speaker: William Hedley Thompson is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science. He is currently starting the Cognitive Dynamics Lab at AIT, Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Gothenburg. His research explores how cognition and the brain can be understood as dynamic, networked systems that flexibly adapt to context. He has previously worked with neuroimaging and cognitive neuroscience groups at Karolinska Institute and Stanford University. His work bridges methodological and theoretical advances in network theory, cognitive neuroscience, and metascience to develop new methods and tools for mapping human cognition.
May 28, 15.00-16.00.
Reading words and ‘reading’ faces: is there a connection in children with dyslexia?
Jakob Åsberg Johnels, Department of Education and Special Education, University of Gothenburg
Location: Torg 3, Floor 3, Forskningsgången 6, Lindholmen.
In the presentation, findings from a research program on face perception in children and adults with neurodevelopmental difficulties will be presented. Using eye-tracking and other techniques, Jakob and his colleagues have explored questions related to lateralisation, eye contact, joint attention, lip-reading, etc, in different populations. In the presentation, Jakob will focus on a sub-project conducted with Martyna Galazka and others on face perception in kids with dyslexia.
Apr. 15, 15.00-16.00.
Curriculum learning in humans and neural networks, but mostly in neural networks
Stefano Sarao Mannelli, Data Science och AI, Data- och informationsteknik, Chalmers
Room J432, Humanisten, Renströmsgatan 6
Throughout our lives, we learn to master remarkably complex tasks. One of the key ingredients behind this success is curriculum learning—the progressive acquisition of increasingly difficult versions of a task. While this idea has long been taken for granted in human learning, it’s only relatively recently that researchers have begun to systematically study it. In contrast, neural networks—used as models of learning since the connectionist movement of the 1990s—have shown mixed results when trained with curricula. In this presentation, I will explore why neural networks often fail to benefit from curriculum learning and identify the regimes where they do gain an advantage. Following the connectionist spirit, I will leverage recent analytical tools to probe neural network behavior. These insights will then be used to design a curriculum-learning experiment in humans, using neural networks as computationally tractable proxies for human learning dynamics.
Feb. 6, 15.00-16.00
Why haven’t we made more progress in the science of human deception?
Timothy Luke
Location: Room F7, Psykologen (Haraldsgatan 1)
2024
Dec. 10, 15.00-16.00. XR ♥ CogSci: Human-centered considerations of extended reality technologies. Kata Szita, School of Communications, Dublin City University and Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics. Location: Torg 3, Department of Applied IT, Floor 3, Forskningsgången 6, Lindholmen
Extended reality (XR) devices and platforms are marketed as tools with endless possibilities for everyone. However, they often seem to privilege white, able-bodied men (Harley, 2020). For example, equipment design often disregards female physiology (e.g., interpupillary distance, hormonal cycle), which increases the chance of cybersickness for female users (Stanney et al., 2020). Race, age, and bodily and cognitive ability-related characteristics are also often excluded from user experience design (Szita, 2022). This presentation overviews hardware and software design flaws and offers an interdisciplinary, human-centered approach combining cognitive and behavioral sciences and human-computer interaction studies to present potential future directions toward universal design and adaptive XR systems.
Nov. 6, 15.00-16.00. An introduction to The science of learning – teaching strategies rooted in cognitive science. Jonas Linderoth, Dept. of Education, Communication and Learning. Location: Room B1 116, Department of education (Pedagogen), House B
In this presentation, Professor Jonas Linderoth will provide an overview of the emerging field in education, cognitive psychology, and cognitive neuroscience, which is labeled "the science of learning." This field is defined as "the scientific study of the underlying bases of learning with the goal of describing, understanding, or improving learning across developmental stages and diverse contexts" (Privitera, Ng, and Che, 2023). Drawing from research mainly in cognitive psychology, Linderoth will discuss which teaching strategies have been identified as most effective. The presentation will also touch upon the key cognitive principles underpinning these teaching strategies—primarily focusing on cognitive load theory. Practical examples are drawn from higher education, discussing how these strategies can be effectively applied in both the overarching instructional design of university courses and the design of presentations and assignments.
The presentation will be held in English and will only be available through live participation; it will neither be recorded nor available for online participation.
Welcome
Privitera, A. J., Ng, S. H. S., & Chen, S. H. A. (2023). Defining the Science of Learning: A scoping review. Trends in Neuroscience and Education, 32, 100206–100206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tine.2023.100206
Sept. 25, 15.00-16.00. Taking the Unreal Seriously: Enriching Cognitive Science With the Notion of Fictionality, Pierre Gander, Dept. of Applied IT. Location: Room J303, Humanisten, Renströmsgatan 6.
Fictionality and fictional experiences are ubiquitous in people’s everyday lives in the forms of movies, novels, video games, pretense and role playing, and digital technology use. Despite this ubiquity, though, the field of cognitive science has traditionally been dominated by a focus on the real world. Based on the limited understanding from previous research on questions regarding fictional information and the cognitive processes for distinguishing reality from fiction, we argue for the need for a comprehensive and systematic account that reflects on related phenomena, such as narrative comprehension or imagination embedded into general theories of cognition. This is important as, for example, incorporating cognitive processing of fictional events into memory theory reshapes the conceptual map of human memory. In this talk, based on a recently published paper, I highlight future challenges for the cognitive studies of fictionality on conceptual, neurological, and computational levels.
May 13, 15.00-16.30. Cognition Forum Kick-off: Analogies: Models based on conceptual spaces, Peter Gärdenfors, Professor in Cognitive Science at Lund University. Location: Room B3316, Pedagogen hus B, Läroverksgatan 15. Drinks and snacks will be provided.