The "Experience effects in early language acquisition" project, a worldwide study

Turning regularities into categories is an important aspect of human cognition. We can make generalizations about new events and entities based on the categories we think they belong to. Structuring knowledge into categories also facilitate search and retrieval. Moreover, remembering specific instances of categories (e.g., the first day at a job) is crucial for how we process information. Similarly, artificial intelligence systems require the capacity to represent and reason about both categories and instances.

Joint presentation of the CogAI team, which serves as an introduction to this first season of CogAI.

This seminar aims to open that dialogue between the fields of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence. Speakers may come from one field or the other, but all will use this opportunity to reflect on how a pairing between the two fields can be stronger than the sum of the parts. 

More info here

This initiative was born from a team of scientists who works across the globe, from Japan to Canada, but whose links were mainly forged in Paris at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique where some of them are and where others have completed their PhD and post-PhD.

Abstract: When we make a free choice, we feel conscious and in control of our decision processes. However, over the past decades, studies on introspection demonstrated that our self-knowledge faculties are crippled by illusory content. In Part i, we suggest that introspection can be framed as a hierarchically organized inference process and we proposed an innovative methodological approach to challenge this hypothesis. We used a free decision paradigm in which no high order nor low motor level processing were solicited.

Artists have been doing experiments on vision longer than neurobiologists. Some major works of art have provided insights as to how we see; some of these insights are so fundamental that they can be understood in terms of the underlying neurobiology.  For example, artists have long realized that color and luminance can play independent roles in visual perception.

Dans sa thèse, Monica Barbir identifie un décalage potentiel entre ce que l'on pense que l'on sait à propos du langage et ce dont on a besoin pour le traitement cognitif du langage.

Language is the most powerful social tool any species has evolved - we can use it to share any idea we can think of with the minds of those around us: from poetry, Shakespeare, and physics, to internet memes it underpins what defines us as a species. But despite centuries of thought and study we still have very little idea of how and why language evolved. As a field primatologist at the University of St Andrews, I have spent 15 years living and working with wild apes in the rainforests and mountains of Uganda.

When speech is heard in the presence of background sound, or when hearing is impaired, the sensory information at the ear is often too ambiguous to support speech recognition by itself. In such circumstances, knowledge-guided processes that help to interpret and repair the degraded signal are required. Such recruitment of cognitive processes is probably why listening in noise “feels” effortful, even when intelligibility is high. Such effort can be aversive, and the goal of making listening less effortful is increasingly recognized as important.