Title: “Asymmetric Stem Cell Division and Germline Immortality.”

 

This event will require a password. If you are not part of the MCB Graduate Program and would like to participate, please contact the program coordinator for the password.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Athulya Aravind (Assistant Professor MIT)

Title: Presupposition and accommodation in child language

Abstract: Natural language affords us the means to communicate not only new information, but also information that we are already taking for granted, our presuppositions. The proper characterization of presupposition has been at the center of long-standing debate. On an influential view (Stalnaker 1970, 1974, Karttunen 1974), presuppositions reflect formal admittance conditions on utterances: an utterance of a sentence which presupposes p is admitted by a conversational context c only if p is already common ground in c. The theory distinguishes two modes of satisfying the formal requirement: (i) presuppositions may have common ground status prior to utterance, or (ii) they may achieve common ground status post-hoc, via accommodation, an adjustment of the common ground by cooperative listeners so as to meet the requirements of the uttered sentence. While intuitive and general, this two-pronged approach has been criticized on empirical and methodological grounds. There have been a number of alternative theories that reject the notion that presuppositions impose admittance conditions and take some form of accommodation as the basic way in which presuppositions relate to the context.

This talk compares these two perspectives on presupposition in terms of their implications for language acquisition. In a series of behavioral experiments, we show that young children generate a default expectation that the presuppositions of an asserted sentence have common ground status prior to utterance, even in situations where accommodation is licensed. More tellingly, even when accommodation is the preferred option for adults, children adopt a different conversational stance. The observed two-step developmental trajectory, we argue, lends support to key tenets of the admittance theory, whose empirical validity may otherwise be masked due to the pragmatic sophistication of adult language users.

Bio: I’m an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at MIT, where I co-direct the Language Acquisition Lab . Prior to this, I was a postdoctoral fellow at the Lab for Developmental Studies at Harvard. I received my PhD in Linguistics from MIT in 2018.

The primary focus of my research is first language acquisition. In particular, I look at children’s developing understanding of what structures are licit in their language, how those structures are interpreted, and how they may be used in conversation. I also moonlight as a syntactician.

Drop in on the Zoom meeting to ask members of CCV’s High-Performance Computing (HPC) team your questions about using Oscar or any other research computing topics you are interested in.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Elisa Felsche (Postdoc University of Michigan)

Title: Exploring the Evolution and Ontogeny of Imitation and Abstraction: A Hierarchical Bayesian Modelling Approach

Abstract: Humans have an immense behavioural and cognitive repertoire that has been shaped by cumulative cultural evolution. In my PhD thesis I investigated two cognitive abilities that crucially enlarge the efficiency of skill and knowledge acquisition: 1) the capability for abstraction that enables powerful generalization of information to make wide ranging predictions in new situations and 2) the ability to imitate others which allows the quick and low-risk adoption of new behavioural strategies. Despite decades of accumulating data in both domains, it is still debated to what extent other species share these abilities and how they develop in humans. Solving these persisting disagreements requires an alteration of how data are generated and analysed.

 

In my dissertation project, I introduced the approach of hierarchical Bayesian modelling to the field of comparative psychology to investigate abstract rule formation and action copying in capuchin monkeys, chimpanzees (only abstract rule formation) and children. In the first two studies participants had to use sampled evidence to infer abstract rules about the item distributions in containers and efficiently guide behaviour in novel test situations. In a third study, we investigated children’s and capuchin monkeys’ ability to integrate causal and social information when copying a goal-directed behaviour. Whereas children’s performance was mostly in line with the predictions of the computational models, showing that they are capable of abstraction and consider causal information when imitating, capuchin monkeys performed in all experiments at chance and chimpanzees showed some understanding of abstract rules.

Bio: Elisa is a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan also working in collaboration the Kibale Chimpanzee Project . She conducted her PhD work on social learning and abstract rule formation in different primate species at the University of St Andrews. She is interested in the evolution of primate cognition and behavior.

Title: Uncovering the development of categories with Markov Chain Monte Carlo with children

Abstract: Uncovering the representation of category structures and their underlying psychological spaces is crucial for understanding human learning. More importantly, charting these structures throughout development can give us important insight into how learning transforms these spaces and how changes are reflected in inference.

While categorization has received much attention in cognitive and developmental science, experiments usually aim at uncovering the underlying representation indirectly, for example, by using measures such as similarity ratings or forced choices for particular category instances.

In this talk, I will present an experimental paradigm, Markov chain Monte Carlo, with people (MCMCp) that directly targets these representations. This paradigm takes inspiration from a prominent statistical method and allows us to obtain samples from an arbitrary distribution. MCMCp allows experiments to flexibly explore the participants’ category representations without pre-specifying the test items. I will show how these types of experiments can be made into engaging and child-friendly tasks, and present preliminary results of an online experiment.

Bio: I want to understand how the (human) mind represents the world and how this representation allows generalization and transfer. To analyze this I compare human learning and generalization with performance and dynamics of machine learning algorithms and computational models.

My supervisor is Christopher Lucas . During my B.Sc. and M.Sc. I worked with Frank Jäkel at the University of Osnabrück , David Lagnado at UCL London and worked as a visiting Ph.D. student with Daphna Buchsbaum  at the University of Toronto.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Andrés Buxó-Lugo (Postdoc, University of Maryland) 

Bio: 

“Lighting up the brain using new molecular tools”

Ahmed Abdelfattah, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Neuroscience (starting April 2021)

Brown University

Grab your lunch and join via Zoom (meeting details to follow)

Please note, this meeting requires you to be logged into Zoom through your Brown account.

 

Abstract:

Animal behavior is produced by patterns of neuronal activity that span a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. Understanding how neural circuits mediate behavior thus requires high-speed recording from ensembles of neurons for long periods of time. In this talk I will describe different ways to record brain activity. Abdelfattah will specifically highlight how voltage imaging provides unparalleled spatial and temporal resolution of the brain’s electrical signaling at the cellular and circuit levels. Abdelfattah will describe his recent work to engineer genetically encoded voltage sensors that allow us to track membrane voltage from multiple neurons in behaving animals (1,2) and future challenges that we can address by engineering new molecular tools to monitor brain activity.

• Abdelfattah, A. S. et al. Bright and photostable chemigenetic indicators for extended in vivo voltage imaging. Science.365, 699–704 (2019).
• Abdelfattah, A. S. et al. A general approach to engineer positive-going eFRET voltage indicators. Nat. Commun.11, (2020).

 

 

 

Neuroscience Graduate Program 

2020-2021 Bench to Bedside Seminar Series

 

Save the Date!

 

Alison Singer, M.B.A. 

Co-Founder and President,

Autism Science Foundation

 

November 12, 2020 at 4:00pm

via Zoom

 

Organized by the Brown University Center for Translational Neuroscience

  

Host: Eric M. Morrow, M.D., Ph.D.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Caren Walker (Assistant Professor University of California, San Diego)

Title : Achieving Abstraction: The early appearance of Relational Reasoning

Abstract: Children’s emerging ability to acquire and apply relational same-different concepts is often cited as a defining feature of human cognition, providing the foundation for abstract thought. Yet, young learners often struggle to ignore irrelevant surface features to attend to structural similarity instead. This has led to the widespread belief that children initially lack relational concepts, which only gradually develop over time. I will begin by reviewing work demonstrating early competence in relational reasoning and propose a novel theoretical approach that challenges the traditional view. Specifically, I will argue that young children have-and retain-genuine relational concepts from a young age, but tend to neglect abstract similarity due to a learned bias to attend to objects and their properties. This account predicts that differences in the structure of children’s environmental input should lead to differences in the type of hypotheses they privilege and apply. I will then present new empirical data in support of this alternative account, emphasizing (1) the robustness of early competence in relational reasoning, (2) the conditions under which older children privilege relational or object similarity, and (3) the causal role of contextual factors on abstract reasoning. Together, these studies provide evidence that the development of abstract thought may be far more malleable and context-sensitive than previously thought.

Research Interests: My research explores how children learn and reason about the causal structure of the world. In particular, I am interested in how even very young learners are able to acquire abstract representations that extend beyond their observations, simply by thinking. How is “learning by thinking” possible? What does this phenomenon tell us about the nature of early mental representations and how they change? To begin to answer these questions, my work focuses on a suite of activities that impose top-down constraints on human inference (e.g., analogy, explanation, and engagement in imaginary worlds). I also explore the development of scientific thinking and reasoning, including children’s understanding of uncertainty. My approach is interdisciplinary, combining perspectives in psychology, philosophy, education, and computational theory.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Youtao Lu (PhD student, Brown)

Join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a conversation focused on Alzheimer’s research at Brown University, featuring:

• Stephen Salloway, Martin M. Zucker Professor of Psychiatry and Human Behavior at Brown, director of neurology and the Memory and Aging Program at Butler Hospital in Providence, RI
• Ashley Webb, Richard and Edna Salomon Assistant Professor of Molecular Biology, Cell Biology and Biochemistry

This event will be moderated by Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Carney Institute, and Christopher Moore, associate director of the Carney Institute.

Join the Carney Institute for Brain Science for a conversation focused on how the brain gets things done, featuring David Badre, professor of cognitive, linguistic and psychological sciences at Brown University. 

This event will be moderated by Diane Lipscombe, Reliance Dhirubhai Ambani Director of the Carney Institute, and Christopher Moore, associate director of the Carney Institute.

Badre, a cognitive neuroscientist, discusses the neuroscience of cognitive control in his new book, On Task , which will be published in November, including the remarkable ways that our brains devise sophisticated actions to achieve our goals.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker: Nicole Holliday (Assistant Professor UPenn)

 

Bio: 

I study sociolinguistics, specifically, how individuals interact with language to conceptualize and construct identity of both self and others. I’m especially interested in how individuals who cross traditionalracial/ethnic boundaries reflect multiple social identities through linguistic practices. Specifically, I examine the use of suprasegmental features that speakers may employ in the performance of their ethnic identities. The focus of my dissertation was intra- and interspeaker prosodic variation in the sociolinguistic behavior of American black/biracial young men.

In April 2016, I defended my dissertation entitled “Intonational Variation, Linguistic Style, and the Black/Biracial Experience” at New York University. My dissertation chair was Renee Blake, and my committee consisted of Lisa Davidson, Greg Guy, John Singler, and Erik Thomas (NCSU). In 2016-2017, I was a Chau Mellon Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. From 2017-2020, I was an Assistant Professor of Linguistics in the Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Pomona College. Since July 2020, I have been an Assistant Professor in the Department of Linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania.

Michael S. Goodman ’74 Memorial Seminar Series.

Speaker:Yoolim Kim (Postdoc, Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History)

Bio: My research focuses on the psycholinguistic processing of writing systems, with specific interest in the Korean alphabet, Hangul. As a postdoctoral researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, my work is on developing ways to quantify visual distinctiveness of characters within a graphic system.