Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

Barbara Ternes was one of several personal assistants to Margaret Mead. Barbara Ternes served as Dr. Mead’s “gatekeeper” during the early 70’s, scheduling and travelling extensively with Dr. Mead. Barbara Ternes was married to the late, Alan Ternes, former Editor Emeritus of the Natural History Magazine and editor of the 1975 publication, Ants, Indidans, and Little Dinosaurs. The Ternes lived in NYC and worked at the American Museum of Natural History. During Dr. Mead’s last days, she lived with Barbara Ternes, at the DeMenille estate on Long Island. Currently, Ms. Ternes lives in Bellows Falls, VT, spends time with her adult children in NYC and frequented Atlanta, GA, spending time with Emory graduate (50C) and friend, the late Father Austin Ford, founder of Emmaus House, an Episcopal outreach in the Peoplestown community of Atlanta. http://www.emoryhistory.emory.edu/facts-figures/people/makers-history/profiles/ford.html (https://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/fall95/austinford.html) Ms. Ternes stopped in f

VIDEOAlthough great apes collaborate for some purposes, recent studies comparing chimpanzees and human children suggest that human collaboration is unique both cognitively and motivationally. In particular humans seem adapted for collaborative foraging, as even young children display numerous relevant mechanisms, from special ways of coordinating and communicating to special ways of sharing food to special forms of social evaluation. The Shared Intentionality hypothesis specifies the ontogeny of these underlying mechanisms and their consequences for both human cognition and human social life.

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Summer Workshop 2018: Human Cognitive Development Across Cultures A collaboration between Simon Fraser University (SFU) and Emory's Center for the Mind Brain and Culture (CMBC). Workshop organizers: Lynne Nygaard, CMBC & Tanya Broesch, SFU Research examining human cognitive development, particularly in psychology, has been almost exclusively based on studying what Henrich and colleagues refer to as "Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic" (WEIRD) populations. Although this is a narrow and unrepresentative slice of humanity, it continues to dominate research published in top developmental psychology journals. This workshop will provide an interdisciplinary forum to present and discuss current issues in understanding human development from a more global perspective. Together, we will address the key question: What have we learned about development across diverse societies that will help us better understand and explain variation in developmental pathways? Discussion and presentatio

Perspectives from dance professionals and professors (Teague and Abarca) on the issue of self-consciousness and the quest for authenticity will be discussed in light of developmental research on the origins of self-concept (Rochat). A developmental blueprint of self-awareness will be presented (Rochat), alongside somatic approaches to dance training, grounding the discussion in what might be the foundations of what we perceive as authentic movement in the context of daily social interactions (Rochat) and in dance performances (Teague and Abarca). The concept of “presence” as opposed to “absence” will be tentatively discussed as a potential subjective benchmark of what we perceive as authentic: something that is direct and devoid of self-consciousness, producing “a flow,” “ a fullness,” “a groundedness” from within.

The Long Shadow: Family Background, Disadvantaged Urban Youth and the Transition to Adulthood tells the story of the Baltimore-based Beginning School Study Youth Panel (BSSYP), a probability sample of typical urban children who came of age over the last decades of the 20th Century and into the first decade of the 21st. It is an account of their social mobility from origins to destinations, framed in life-course perspective. Two characteristic mobility paths are documented, both grounded in family resources: 1) status attainment through school serves mainly to preserve middle class privilege across generations; 2) status attainment in the non-college workforce privileges lower SES whites over African Americans of like background, white men most immediately through access to high wage employment in the remnants of Baltimore’s old industrial economy and then, derivatively, to the lower SES white women who marry and partner with them.

Taking the Lead on Motivation Proponents of Predictive Processing (PP) describe it as a grand unifying theory of the mind (Hohwy 2014, Clark 2015). However, the relationship between PP and its closest rival, reinforcement learning (RL), is controversial. Unificationists about PP sometimes argue that active inference can account for core features of RL (Friston et al. 2009). Anti-unificationists reject this and defend explanatory pluralism as the most promising avenue for scientific progress (Colombo and Wright 2016). I argue for an intermediate position: even if RL is a special case of Bayes-optimal inference, it remains better suited to explaining motivation – and failures of motivation – than its more abstract counterpart (Dayan and Abbott 2001, Trappenberg 2002, Woodward 2014, Klein 2016).

Professor Tecumseh Fitch Dept of Cognitive Biology, University of Vienna, Austria I investigate human language viewed as a species-typical aspect of our biology, and attempt to understand it via comparison with other species’ cognition and communication systems (the comparative approach). The first step in doing so is to break language down to its components (the multi-component approach) and then ask which components are shared with which other species (or not). I present evidence for continuity in speech perception, most aspects of speech production, and of human conceptual semantics with animal cognition, and evidence for discontinuity when it comes to organizing principles of syntax (hierarchical structure) and potentially some aspects of semantics (pragmatic, theory-of-mind based production). I conclude that comparative research, guided by specific computational and mechanistic models deriving from linguistics and cognitive science, must play a central role in future attempts to understand language evolu

Neuroscience has advanced considerably in the 40 years after Nagel’s classic essay, posing the question of “what it’s like to be a bat.” Drawing on recent results in which dogs are trained for awake fMRI studies, Profs. Berns and Risjord will discuss and debate whether we are at the point where neuroscience can provide meaningful insights into the subjective experiences of other animals.

Dr. Mesa-Castillo has been conducting research on schizophrenia for more than 33 years in Cuba, the United States, Spain, Brazil, Venezuela, and Ethiopia. He will provide an overview of his research, which provided the first direct evidence of virus infection in the central nervous system in schizophrenia [Journal of Microbiology Review, 1995] and also advanced the application of electro-microscopy to the study of serious mental illness. Dr. Mesa-Castillo's presentation will address the role of infection and fetal programming in mental illness, as well as the importance of disease prevention through investigation of the prenatal stage of development. Dr. Mesa-Castillo is the recipient of numerous awards, including an International Award from the U.S. Stanley Foundation and a Distinguished Investigator Award from NARSAD.

Scientists have identified a series of milestones in the evolution of the human food quest that they anticipate had far-reaching impacts on biological, behavioral and cultural evolution: the inclusion of substantial portions of meat, the broad-spectrum revolution and the transition to food production. The foraging shift to dense and predictable resources is another key milestone that had consequential impacts on the later part of human evolution. The theory of economic defendability predicts that this shift had an important consequence: elevated levels of intergroup territoriality and conflict. In this talk, I integrate this theory with a well-established general theory of hunter-gatherer adaptations and make predictions for the sequence of appearance of several evolved traits of modern humans. I review the distribution of dense and predictable resources in Africa and argue that they occur only in aquatic contexts (coasts, rivers and lakes). The paleoanthropological empirical record contains recurrent evidenc

A fundamental and frequently overlooked aspect of animal learning is its reliance on compatibility between the learning rules used and the attentional and motivational mechanisms directing them to process the relevant data (called here data-acquisition mechanisms). We propose that this coordinated action, which may first appear fragile and error prone, is in fact extremely powerful, and critical for understanding cognitive evolution. Using basic examples from imprinting and associative learning, we argue that by coevolving to handle the natural distribution of data in the animal's environment, learning and data-acquisition mechanisms are tuned jointly so as to facilitate effective learning using relatively little memory and computation. We then suggest that this coevolutionary process offers a feasible path for the incremental evolution of complex cognitive systems, because it can greatly simplify learning. This is illustrated by considering how animals and humans can use these simple mechanisms to learn comp

Our ability to teach and learn from each other is a foundational aspect of human nature. It has underpinned the remarkable evolutionary success of our species and remains critical to the fortunes and prospects of modern societies. This CMBC Symposium brings together perspectives from ethnography, developmental psychology, neuroscience, and the sociology of education for a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary investigation of what we have learned about the many ways in which we learn. Panelists: Susan Gelman (Department of Psychology, University of Michigan), Jason Yeatman (Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, University of Washington), Cassidy Puckett (Department of Sociology, Emory University), and Barry Hewlett (Department of Anthropology, Washington State University)

One of the most challenging aspects of learning is theory-change -- abandoning an old explanatory framework for a new one.  When is theory change possible, and when do intuitive theories persist alongside those that are taught in school? How do children's intuitive theories distort the lessons from school?  And what are the (implicit) mechanisms that work to foster or suppress children's intuitive theories? I examine these questions by focusing on two conceptual biases (essentialism and teleology) within different cultural contexts.

A central and consequential feature of technological competence in the digital age is the ability to learn new technologies as they emerge--what I call "digital adaptability." Macro-level research suggests differences in digital adaptability are related to various forms of inequality. However, research has not yet been able to link macro-level trends to micro-level processes, made difficult without a direct measure of adaptability. My research addresses this gap by defining and measuring adolescents' digital adaptability and connecting it to educational inequality in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics). In this presentation, I describe a study in Chicago and a replication study in Boston involving a total of ~2,600 students in which I validated a measure of digital adaptability and found a link between adaptability and adolescents' current STEM participation, educational plans, and career aspirations--all prerequisites for future completion of college degrees in STEM fields, wi

The brain did not evolve specialized circuits for reading. Rather, the process of learning to read induces changes in the underlying structure and function of the brain that support this fundamental academic skill. In other words, education scaffolds the development of the brain's reading circuitry. In this talk, I will first outline the neurobiological underpinnings of literacy and give an overview of how the brain converts symbols on a page to sound and meaning. Then I will present new data showing how reading instruction induces changes in the brain that track the learning process. These data reveal that the anatomical structure of the brain is surprisingly plastic, and that networks of anatomical connections flexibly adapt to meet the demands of a child's learning environment.