2025
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.