Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

The Social Mind: A Festschrift Symposium Honoring Prof. Frans B. M. de Waal (September 19, 2014) Sponsored by the Department of Psychology, Emory College of Arts and Sciences, Emory University.

Some things are easier to mix together than others.  There is the proverbial problem of mixing oil and water, but then there is also the smooth blending of coffee and cream.  Bringing together students from film studies and psychology in order to study theory of mind might best be described as midway between these extremes—for us the best metaphor is peanut butter and chocolate—not always easy to integrate, but the result is well worth it (as the Reese’s candy folks have shown). In recent years, there has been a significant increase in collaboration between the social sciences and the humanities.  Venerable humanities journals such as Style now publish reports on digital analyses of modern and classic texts as well as writings discussing the evolutionary significance of fiction.  Publications such as The Scientific Study of Literature and The Journal of Aesthetics, Creativity and the Arts have appeared.   It should come as no surprise that there is controversy surrounding these new "Reese’s Peanut Butter

‘Willusionists’ argue that science is discovering that free will is an illusion. Their arguments take a variety of forms, but they often suggest that if the brain is responsible for our actions, then we are not.  And they predict that ordinary people share this view.  I will discuss some evidence that most people do not think that free will or responsibility conflict with the possibility that our decisions could be perfectly predicted based on earlier brain activity.  I will consider why this possibility might appear problematic but why it shouldn’t.  Once we define free will properly, we see that neuroscience and psychology can help to explain how it works, rather than explain it away.  Human free will is allowed by a remarkable assembly of neuropsychological capacities, including imagination, control of attention, valuing, and ‘self-habituation’. September 17, 2014

Rituals pose a cognitive paradox: although widely used to treat problems, they are cultural conventions and lack causal explanations for their effects. How do people evaluate the efficacy of rituals in the absence of causal information? To address this question, I have examined the kinds of information that influence perceptions of ritual efficacy experimentally (Legare & Souza, 2012; 2013). I conducted three studies (N = 162) in Brazil, a cultural context in which rituals called simpatias are used to treat a great variety of problems ranging from asthma to infidelity. Using ecologically-valid content, I designed experimental simpatias to manipulate the kinds of information that influence perceptions of efficacy (e.g., repetition, number of procedural steps). The results provide evidence that information reflecting intuitive causal principles affects how people evaluate ritual efficacy. I propose that the structure of ritual is the product of an evolved cognitive system of intuitive causality.

As a group, we will examine the kinds of ritualistic remedies used to treat a great variety of problems across highly diverse cultural contexts and vast stretches of historical time. Our objective will be to identify the kinds of information people may use to evaluate the efficacy of these pervasive cultural practices.

In the context of three major Mediterranean modes of religious thought and practice—mythical, philosophical, and ritual—early Christians produced writings during the first century CE that exhibit six discursive-religious forms of life. The conceptual blending of time, space, and body in this discursive-religious environment created interactive emergence identifiable as prophetic, apocalyptic, wisdom, precreation, miracle, and priestly thought and practice. Rhetography, which is rhetoric that evokes graphic images and pictures in the mind, working interactively with rhetology, which is rhetoric that produces verbal argumentation, nurtured such energetic cognitive-conceptual blends that their effects are still observable in Christianity today. This presentation will feature a combination of past results and recent insights from Emory Sawyer Seminars on Visual Exegesis and Hermeneutics

Scientific research on meditation has grown exponentially in the last two decades, yet that research often remains disconnected from the academic study of religion. Likewise, cognitive scientific approaches to religion often seem irrelevant to the scientific study of meditation. Why do these fields of research largely fail to interact, and what does it tell us about our notion of religion?

In both lay and scientific writing, natural explanations (potentially knowable and empirically verifiable phenomena of the physical world) and supernatural explanations (phenomena that violate or operate outside of, or distinct from, the natural world) are often conceptualized in contradictory or incompatible terms. My research has demonstrated that this common assumption is psychologically inaccurate. I propose instead that the same individuals frequently use both natural and supernatural explanations to interpret the very same events. To support this hypothesis, my colleagues and I reviewed converging developmental data on the coexistence of natural and supernatural explanations from diverse cultural contexts in three areas of biological thought: the origin of species, the acquisition of illnesses, and the causes of death (Legare, Evans, Rosengren, & Harris, 2012; Legare & Visala, 2011; Legare & Gelman, 2008). We identified multiple predictable and universal ways in which both kinds of explanati

Imitation is multifunctional; it is crucial not only for the transmission of instrumental skills but also for learning cultural conventions such as rituals (Herrmann, Legare, Harris, & Whitehouse, 2013; Legare & Herrmann, 2013). Despite the fact that imitation is a pervasive feature of children’s behavior, little is known about the kinds of information children use to determine when an event provides an opportunity for learning instrumental skills versus cultural conventions. In my talk I will discuss a program of research aimed at developing an integrated theoretical account of how children use imitation flexibly as a tool for cultural learning. I propose that the cognitive systems supporting flexible imitation are facilitated by the differential activation of an instrumental stance (i.e., rationale based on physical causation) and a ritual stance (i.e., rationale based on cultural convention). I will present evidence that the instrumental stance increases innovation and the ritual stance increases i

We hypothesize that when people engage sacred values that underpin many political conflicts, they behave differently than when operating with the more mundane values of the marketplace and normal social interactions. Given the importance of sacred values, and their potential for triggering violent conflict, it is important to understand how sacred values become intertwined in decision making. Traditionally, this type of investigation has been the purview of anthropology and sociology. However, recent advances in functional brain imaging make it possible to use this technology to uncover biological signatures in the brain for sacred values and the neural systems that come online when they are violated.

While ritualized behavior is not exclusively associated with religious experience, there is clearly a powerful affinity between religion and ritual. A look at the evolutionary roots of human ritual and several of its cognitive and experiential characteristics sheds interesting light on some of the underlying reasons for this affinity.

Theorists in the cognitive science of religion have proposed that many religious proclivities are by-products of garden-variety cognitive systems that humans share. This general theoretical proposal has generated a variety of notable experimental findings pertaining to such matters as the character and memorability of religious representations, the failure of religious participants to deploy orthodox beliefs in on-line cognitive processing, and the human penchant for “promiscuous teleology.” Subsequent influences on the cognitive science of religion over the past fifteen years do not differ from those affecting cognitive science more broadly. Perhaps the three most prominent of those influences concern evolutionary considerations, the growing availability of brain imaging tools, and an interest in religious experience and embodiment. Each has inspired experimental studies that have produced comparably significant findings concerning such topics as developmental regularities in reasoning about the afterlife, t

A focus on interpretation at the expense of explanation in the humanities, particularly religious studies, an insistence on the autonomy of the social sciences at the cost of underestimating the value of psychology, and an overemphasis on cultural differences while being blind to human commonalities in anthropology all presented obstacles to developing a theoretically sophisticated, empirically tractable science of religion until the cognitive revolution provide the means and methods to do so.

Enabling computers to understand images remains one of the hardest open problems in artificial intelligence. No machine vision system comes close to matching human ability at identifying the contents of images or visual scenes or at recognizing similarity between different scenes, even though such abilities pervade human cognition. In this talk I will describe research---currently in early stages---on bridging the gap between low-level perception and higher-level image understanding by integrating a cognitive model of pattern recognition and analogy-making with a neural model of the visual cortex. (April 9, 2014)

What can we learn from brain imaging, and what are its limits? Drs. Gregory Berns and Scott Lilienfeld will discuss – and debate – the promise and perils of brain imaging with regard to mind-reading, neuromarketing, lie detection, criminal responsibility, and psychiatric diagnosis. More broadly, they will explore scientific and ethical controversies concerning neuroimaging, and strive to separate fact from fiction in both popular and academic coverage of this technology. (March 27, 2014)