Rick Sander PhD

Professor of Law
Director, Empirical Research Group
UCLA School of Law

The Mismatch Effect and the Consequences of Prop 209
Thursday, October 13, 2011

Michael Goldstein PhD

Associate Professor
Department of Psychology
Cornell University

Emergence of Complex Communications from Simple Interactions:
Lessons from Songbirds and Human Infants
Thursday, October 20, 2011

Ben Bergen PhD

Associate Professor
Department of Cognitive Science
UCSD

Does Language Put Mental Simulation in the Driver's Seat
Thursday, October 27, 2011

Martin Monti PhD

Assistant Professor
Department of Psychology & Neurosurgery
UCLA

Topic TBA
Thursday, November 17, 2011

Trevor Robbins PhD

Professor of Psychology
University of Cambridge

Topic TBA
Thursday, December 1, 2011

Josh McDermott, PhD

Research Associate
Center for Neural Science and Howard Hughes Institute
NYU

Topic Understanding Audition Via Sound Analysis and Synthesis
Thursday, March 1, 2012

Robert Levenson PhD

Professor of Psychology
Director, Institute of Personal and Social Research
UC Berkeley
Personal home page

Topic: Neurological models of psychological dysfunction: An idea whose time has come?
Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Jessica Sommerville, PhD

Department of Psychology
University of Washington
Personal home page

Topic: Fairness expectations in infancy: individual differences and developmental change in the second year of life
Thursday, April 12

The acquisition and maintenance of social and moral norms that govern one’s own and other’s behavior is fundamental to social harmony and cohesion. One prominent norm that guides adults’ actions and evaluations of events is the norm of a fair and equal distribution of goods based on the “principle of equality”: that, all other things considered, goods should be divided equally to recipients. A critical question concerns when and how infants and children acquire such norms. In this talk, I will present a series of studies that investigated the development of fairness expectations in infancy, and the relation between these expectations and infants' prosocial behavior. Our results to date suggest that there are developmental changes in fairness expectations early in the second year of life, linked to infants' altruistic tendencies. I will discuss the implications of our findings with respect to the underlying nature of infants' fairness expectations, and mechanisms and factors driving development in the acquisition of socio-moral norms more broadly.

Ione Fine, PhD

Department of Psychology
University of Washington
Personal home page

Topic: The recruitment of visual motion area MT+ for auditory motion processing in early blind individuals
Thursday, April 19

Examining people who are blind from birth provides a powerful way to examine how sensory input determines cortical organization because normally almost 30% of cerebral cortex is devoted to vision. Here I will describe a series of studies examining motion-sensitive area MT+ in individuals who have been blind from early childhood, and in two rare sight-recovery subjects who were blind since early childhood and whose vision was partially recovered in adulthood. While most visual form processing is severely impaired by blindness, visual motion processing remains surprisingly robust after years of deprivation. Curiously, these robust visual motion responses co-exist with strong cross-modal plasticity. In early blind and sight recovery subjects we see responses to within MT+ that are specific to auditory motion compared with other complex auditory stimuli. Thus, MT+ develops motion-specific responses to nonvisual input that seems to be influenced by the normal functional specialization of that area. Further, these responses within MT+ are associated with behavioral choice on a trial-by-trial basis, are associated with superior auditory motion performance within blind individuals, and replace rather than augment the region of auditory cortex (planum temporale) associated with the processing of auditory motion within sighted individuals.