Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Translation is often thought of as a transparent, objective act in which words from a source language are rendered into a target language, thereby carrying a message into new linguistic territory. Theorists, practitioners and lay readers argue tirelessly over the success or failure of various translations and their degree of (in-)fidelity. In this talk, I would like to begin from the premise that an instrumentalist view of translation will by default always evaluate target texts through a rhetoric of loss (Venuti). More useful is an a priori appreciation of translation as a creative, authorial act. To this end, I will explore connotation and subjectivity in literary translation, with several examples from contemporary Hispanophone literature.

Groups adopt strikingly different attitudes and practices centered on how humans and other living beings relate to their environment. These bodies of traditional ecological knowledge (TEK) have been the focus of extensive research in ethnobiology. Understanding TEK is important both theoretically and for advancing political projects such as ecological conservation and cooperative resource management. However, attempts to integrate insights from TEK with scientific biological thought often misconstrue its content and function. Ethnobiology frequently represents TEK as a cultural module that can be cleanly separated from religious, symbolic, or mythic beliefs, rites and practices, and material culture. Drawing on case studies of Indigenous botanical and zoological TEK, I argue that knowledge of the natural world does not constitute a cultural domain that can be carved off and represented in isolation. This claim is bolstered by psychological studies of belief in ritual efficacy and causal explanations of natura

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/KfTYHlPUfvY ) Inside the Lab | Daniel Dilks (dilkslab) interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

For millennia, sociocultural complexity increased (and occasionally decreased) gradually over many human generations, as people inherited traditional knowledge within kin-based local communities. In these settings, where knowledge was shared within populations and across generations, selection was probably the key driver in norms of human adaptive behavior. In the 21st century, however, knowledge is transmitted across populations and within generations — and evolutionary patterns may resemble random drift more than selection in increasingly many settings. To span these different scales and modes of cultural evolution, different representations are useful, including fitness landscapes and a heuristic representing the transparency of payoffs in social learning. Using examples from computational social science, I will discuss how cultural evolution may have profoundly changed from the ancient past to present-day.

Working memory capacity and fluid intelligence are highly related as shown by labs around the world and in any populations.  My recent work demonstrates that individual differences in ability to control attention underlies this relationship.  Attention control is both a state and a trait variable. Measures of attention control are highly reliable and valid predictors of performance in multitasking and other complex cognitive tasks. In addition, environmental variables such as sleep deprivation and psychopathology lead to reduced capability to control attention which can, in turn, lead to reduced cognitive ability.

How many published articles and grant awards would you like to add to your CV this year? The more the better, right? But is life in the fast lane really the best way to do science?In her Trends in Cognitive Science (January 2020, vol. 24, no. 1) article, Uta Frith (University College, London) asserts that Fast Science is bad for scientists and for science.  She provides suggestions for ways in which researchers might pursue Slow Science and make faster progress as a result.  Slow Science may also lead to a shift in research culture that is more sustainable and healthier for researchers.LINK TO PAPER

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/5JEuBLdFw38 ) Inside the Lab | Arber Tasimi interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL (https://youtu.be/KkP6QqCTREY) Inside the Lab | Ken Carter interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/oWKZz4HWtmk ) Inside the Lab | Lauren Klein interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL (https://youtu.be/OK-_FL0zePY ) Inside the Lab | John Lindo (lindoancientdna.com) interviewed by Dietrch Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/9WjuZKPWQb8 ) Inside the Lab | Marcela Benitez interviewed by Dietrich Stout, Associate Director CMBC.

ORIGINAL FORMAT VIDEO - SEE OUR YOUTUBE CHANNEL ( https://youtu.be/6nyI8oGw59k ) Inside the Lab | Mel Konner interviewed by Lynne Nygaard, Director CMBC.

An interdisciplinary discussion about the intersection of Theater and Linguistics, and specifically their approach to dialects.  The lunch will explore language, and its performance, through the lens of emotion, culture, and practice.     

No sensory system is an island.  The auditory and visual systems work together to provide information about the nature of the events occurring in the environment.  I will talk about why they do this, where in the brain it happens, and how the brain performs the necessary computations to achieve it.  I will emphasize the following general insights:  1. Interactions between sensory systems occur at the earliest possible point in the auditory pathway, namely, the eardrum. 2. The brain may employ a strategy akin to time-division multiplexing, in which neural activity fluctuates across time, to allow representations to represent more than one simultaneous stimulus.   These findings speak to several general problems confronting modern neuroscience such as the hierarchical organization of brain pathways and limits on perceptual/cognitive processing. 

Media require active perception from their users. Videogames provide perhaps the most obvious example of this; in order to perceive the world of a videogame, a user must play the game, negotiating its spaces and manipulating its objects. While perception of cinema may be less obviously active, it is in fact no less active than is perception of games. At the turn of the Twentieth Century, the emergence of film established new modes of experience for viewers, and perception of films remains a skill that cinema-goers continually develop and refine. Perception of media has often been treated as an exception to the operations of perception in general. Reflecting on the twin examples of the 2011 videogame The Unfinished Swan and the 1900 film How it Feels to be Run Over, I propose that active perception in media use might be seen as exemplary of, rather than exceptional to, the work we do every day in order to perceive the world around us.

Tool making and use are often considered a hallmark of intelligence: the discovery that New Caledonian crows made tools caused a flurry of excitement in the world of animal cognition with much talk of 'feathered apes’.  Of the explanations for the rarity of tool making across the animal kingdom (e.g. brain size, group size, sociality), none appear satisfactory.  The rarity of the behaviour makes it difficult to study in an evolutionary context, but a phenotypically similar behaviour, nest building, is not at all rare. And it is increasingly amenable to investigation: I will present evidence of decision making with regard to appropriate materials and local environmental conditions, associating building decisions with reproductive success and the possibility of cultural evolution of built structures.

To start with, the talk will review and update the hypothesis (How the Brain Got Language, Oxford University Press, 2012) that early Homo sapiens were language-ready in the sense that they had brains that could have supported language had it already been developed – but they were not language-using. The approach sees protolanguage emerging from complex recognition and imitation of manual skills via biocultural evolution, while cultural evolution alone supported the emergence of language from protolanguage. The key innovation in this talk is the argument that this approach supports the view that the H. sapiens language-ready brain had the more general property of being construction-ready. This notion will be illustrated with data from monkey and human tool use and bird nest construction (introducing the word becculation, manipulation with a beak, into the English language) as well as data and speculations on symbols and symbolism in the protohistory of human architecture.

Although using tools is a central feature of human biology, the lack of biologically-grounded theory in this domain limits our ability to study the phenomenon to relate it to human evolution. To begin to fill this gap, I present a theory of tooling applicable to individuals of all species. The theory draws on (a) ecological (perception–action) theory in psychology, that links an animal’s behavior to its perception of affordances, (b) psychological theories about how animals perceive space and move themselves in space, and (c) the biomechanical approach to the study of body movement and the development of coordination of movement.  Tooling theory supports testable hypotheses concerning a) the forms of tooling present in diverse taxa with varying perceptual and motor systems and bodies, b) the effects of specific environmental, individual, and task features on a specific performance, and c) the development of tooling. The determination that an action is or is not tooling has no bearing on a judgment about the i

Jumping spiders (family Salticidae) have unique, complex eyes and a capacity for spatial vision exceeding that for any other animals of similar size. Most salticid species prey on insects but some species from a subfamily, Spartaeinae, are known to express an active preference for other spiders as prey (‘araneophagy’). We can gain important insights into animal cognition by exploring how these species use strategies for targeting this dangerous type of prey. For instance, studies using expectancy violation methods have shown that one of these spartaeine species, Portia africana, works with representations of different types of prey spiders. It also plans detours for reaching vantage points for capturing prey, and can decide ahead of time whether a detour is necessary. Moreover, new expectancy-violation experiments have shown that Portia africana represents the number of prey in a scene; P. africana becomes less inclined to complete a detour path if it encounters a different number of prey from what it had see

Introduction by Laura Emmery, Emory University, Department of Music Emory Music Department's McDowell Lecture Series withCo-Sponsored by CMBC, The Hightower Fund, and the Program in Linguisticspresents:Lawrence Zbikowski, Professor of Music and the Humanities, University of Chicago"Music and the Language of Emotions" His research focuses on the application of recent work in cognitive science to a range of problems confronted by music scholars, including the nature of musical grammar, the relationship between music and movement, text-music relations, and the structure of theories of music. He is the author of Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (2002) and Foundations of Musical Grammar (2017). He has recently contributed chapters to Music and Consciousness 2, Music-Dance: Sound and Motion in Contemporary Discourse, The Routledge Companion to Music Cognition, Music in Time: Phenomenology, Perception, Performance, and The Oxford Handbook of Topic Theory. During 2010–11 he held a fell