Center For Mind, Brain, And Culture

A growing body of research points to a significant effect of bilingualism on cognitive outcomes across the lifespan. The main finding is evidence for the enhancement of executive control at all stages in the lifespan, with the most dramatic results being maintained cognitive performance in elderly adults and protection against the onset of dementia. These results shed new light on the question of how cognitive and linguistic systems interact in the mind and brain. I will review evidence from both behavioral and imaging studies and propose a framework for understanding the mechanism that could lead to the reported consequences of bilingualism and the limitation or absence of these effects under some conditions. (November 11, 2015) Sponsored by the CMBC with additional support from the Departments of Psychology, German Studies, French and Italian Studies, Russian and East Asian Languages and Cultures (REALC), Middle Eastern and South Asian Studies (MESAS), the Emory College Language Center (ECLC), the Program i

There has recently been an international surge of interest in building large brain models. The European Union's Human Brain Project (HBP) has received 1 billion euros worth of funding, and President Obama announced the Brain Initiative along with a similar level of funding. However the large scale models affiliated with both projects do not demonstrate how their generated complex neural activity relates to observable behaviour -- arguably the central challenge for neuroscience. I will present our recent work on large-scale brain modeling that is focussed on both biological realism and reproducing human behaviour. I will demonstrate how the model relates to both low-level neural data and high-level behavioural data. Finally, I will discuss applications of this research to understanding both the biological basis of cognition and building more advanced robots. [March 25, 2015]

Why is there some “religious stuff” in all human societies? A tempting answer is that religions are somehow grounded in evolved properties of human minds. Recently, some have even suggested that religion could have been selected for ensuring large-scale cooperation and prosocial behavior. Considering the empirical evidence leads to a more sober understanding of the evolutionary processes underpinning the emergence and spread of religious concepts and norms. The term “religion” misleadingly lumps together three very different kinds of social-cultural processes, unlikely to have spread in the same contexts. I propose to model the diffusion of religious concepts in terms of cultural epidemics based on universal cognitive dispositions, showing how some (not all) religious concepts can serve as recruitment devices in building coalitions. [March 24, 2015]

An essential feature of any society is the capacity of its members to distinguish one another from outsiders and reject outsiders on that basis. Some social insects and humans are able to form huge societies because their membership is anonymous—members aren’t required to distinguish all the other members as individuals for the society to remain unified. Societies are instead bonded by shared identity cues and signals, such as society-specific odors in ants and learned social labels in humans. I contrast this with societies of nonhuman vertebrates, which achieve a maximum of 200 members by the necessity that each member recalls every other member individually. The capacity to form an anonymous society is a complex trait that I will show could have arisen in our ancestors well before language. While there has been a perennial focus on the cooperative networks that emerge inside each society, identification with a clearly defined group of members, and not coop­eration or kinship as many experts assert, is the m

The language(s) that we know shape the way we process and represent the speech that we hear. Since real-world speech recognition almost always takes place in conditions that involve some sort of background noise, we can ask whether the influence of linguistic knowledge and experience on speech processing extends to the particular challenges posed by speech-in-noise recognition, specifically the perceptual separation of speech from background noise (Experiment Series 1) and the cognitive representation of speech and concurrent background noise (Experiment Series 2). In Experiment Series 1, listeners were asked to recognize English sentences embedded in a background of competing speech that was either English (matched-language, English-in-English recognition) or another language (mismatched-language, e.g. English-in-Mandarin recognition). Listeners were either native or non-native listeners of the target language (usually, English), and were either familiar or unfamiliar with the language of the to-be-ignored,

Collective memory—sometimes referred to as public memory, or social (or cultural) memory—is a term commonly used in the humanities. It posits the act of remembering as ineluctably linked to what the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (who is credited with elaborating the concept) called the “social frameworks” of memory such as family, class, ethnic, national or religious communities. Within these social frameworks, an individual’s recollection of events is shaped by the shared experience of that event as the group in question frames it. Cognitive scientists, on the other hand, speak in terms of personal memory, distinguishing among three types—procedural, semantic, and episodic—that enable individuals to register and recall a range of experiences. How do we go from the multiplicity of private, individual memories to the potential unity of collective memory? Inversely, can the collective memory of an event shared by a social group influence the way an individual recollects her experience of that same event?

The time seems right to rethink how the fields of cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience could take advantage of each other. Both fields make use of quantitative models, one of cognitive processes the other of brain processes. Since the brain ultimately supports cognitive processes one should think these levels of description should merge. Interestingly that has largely not happened yet. We will discuss possible approaches and areas of content where such overlap might become possible in the near future. [February 19, 2015]

Few would contest the claim that Shakespeare was a great poet and playwright. Less indisputable, perhaps, is the notion that he was also a great social theorist. By this, I'm not referring to theory in the weak sense of occasional philosophically nuanced comments by characters, or speeches with philosophical overtones. I mean that Shakespeare was a social theorist in the strong sense that, in addition to being powerful stories, his plays often are extended reflections on many of the classic issues of social thought. If I'm right about this, it raises an important question about literary technique and voice. Normally the analytical voice of the theorist is very different and in some sense in tension with the narrative voice of the dramatist or novelist. Reconciling the requirements of effective theoretical analysis and affecting dramatic narrative is a major challenge. This talk, adapted from my upcoming book on Shakespeare and social theory, deals with one important way in which Shakespeare accomplished this

We now recognize that our brains are more plastic than once imagined.  Research in neurobiology has shown that how our brains function is shaped by reciprocal influences between genetics, development, behavior, culture, and environment.  However, much of this research has been done in laboratory and clinical settings, without concurrent examination of how brains vary in the wild.  This talk will outline the field of neuroanthropology using prominent examples including addiction and balance, and then reflect on how this synergy of neuroscience and anthropology emerged out of the biocultural approach pioneered at Emory. November 13, 2014


What does it mean for a musician to “think musical thoughts”?  How does such thinking interact with processes that seem more like “feeling” than thinking? And how do both relate in real time to pre-established habits of thought and feeling, communal conventions regarding interpretation and performance, one’s own highly trained but flexible motor routines, and feedback from hearing oneself?  We look at such questions (as time permits) from the perspective of music study, rehearsal and performance, especially in small ensembles, where awareness of other performers’ roles and a sense of the musical whole are additional crucial factors.   Finally, how are all these factors coordinated in real time performance?  Who or what—if anything--is in charge? October 16, 2014


Thursday, 4:00 pm, PAIS 290 We have known for more than forty years that the brains of humans and other animals are sexually dimorphic. That is, there are reliable differences in the average size, shape, and connectivity of male and female brains. While the existence of neural sex differences is beyond dispute, their significance is controversial. What do neural sex differences mean for social norms, mental health, and the perennial argument about “nature vs. nurture”? This talk will focus on the neuroscience of sex differences. The speaker will describe how sex differences in the brain are typically studied and how the factors that influence their development have been identified. Gonadal hormones such as testosterone and estrogen play a major role in establishing sex differences. Yet at the same time, sex-typical experiences are also important in the development of male and female brains. That is, both hormones and hormone-driven experience seem to be necessary for the normal development and expression of s

Over a decade ago, I proposed that memory errors can b e classified into seven fundamental categories or "sins": transience, absent-mindedness, blocking, misattribution, suggestibility, bias, and persistence. During the past decade, much has been learned about each of the seven sins, especially as a result of research that has combined the methods of psychology and neuroscience. This presentation will provide an update on our current understanding of the seven sins, with a focus on the sins of absent-mindedness (failures of attention that result in memory errors) and misattribution (when information is mistakenly assigned to the wrong source, resulting in memory distrotions such as false recognition). I will discuss recent research on absent-mindedness that has examined the role of mind wandering in memory for lectures, and will present evidence indicating that interpolated testing can counter such absent-minded lapses. I will also discuss recent research that has clarified both cognitive and neural

The development of psychopathology occurs through the complex interplay of genes, experience, and the brain.  In this talk, I will describe a developmental neurogenetics approach to understanding the development of psychopathology.  In this approach, individual variability in genetic background is linked to neural function and subsequent risk and resilience through interactions with the environment. Guided by a developmental psychopathology framework, I will give examples of approaches to link genes, brain, behavior, and experience, with a particular emphasis on studies from my lab aimed at understanding the development of antisocial behavior (e.g., aggression, theft, and violation of serious rules). These examples highlight the role of serotonin genes on amygdala reactivity, the role of amygdala reactivity in antisocial behavior, and the importance of identifying subtypes of antisocial behavior such as callous-unemotional traits and psychopathy that may have different etiologies. September 24, 2014


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.

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.