This program is aimed at early career researchers from all parts of
the world, including PhD students, postdocs, early career faculty
members, honours students, postbac students, and masters students. To be
listed on this page or to update your listing please edit this Google
doc, then e-mail Charles at c.kemp@unimelb.edu.au to
ask him to update the page accordingly.
Anyone with work to present is welcome to create an ad! If you feel that you don’t have material for a lab meeting presentation but would like to connect in other ways (e.g. by informal discussions over email or Zoom), you’re also welcome to post an ad.
(May 2022) My name is Ashley J Thomas (email
ajthomas@mit.edu) and I’m a postdoc at MIT. I study how
infants and children think about social relationships. I would focus on
three sets of studies (or some subset depending on limits!) that
illustrate that infants and children understand who is connected to whom
and how they are connected. First, young children and even infants
perceive relationship closeness, and distinguish intimate from other
cooperative relationships. Second, school-age children distinguish
hierarchical from egalitarian relationships in groups and prefer to join
egalitarian groups. Third, infants infer their own relationships with
new individuals, by selectively observing their parents’ social
interactions with those new individuals.
(May 2022) My name is Chris Rourk (email
crourk@jw.com) and I am an independent researcher. I study
an energy transfer mechanism in catecholaminergic neurons that is
hypothesized to be associated with cognition and action selection, and
have sponsored tests at a commercial laboratory (EAG Labs) and at a
university (Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering)
that have produced results that were predicted by the earlier
hypothesis, which is published here.
I would provide an overview of the hypothesis, these results, other
results from published research that support the hypothesis and
suggestions for future research
(May 2022) Hi! I’m Carolyn
Baer, a postdoc in cognitive development at UC Berkeley. I study how
children represent uncertainty and leverage their uncertainty to learn
about the world and interact with others. My work taps into questions
about metacognition, social learning, collaboration, and math learning.
I have an overview talk (35-45 min) or can present/discuss individual
projects. You can reach me at carolynbaer@berkeley.edu
.
(May 2022) Hi! I’m Annie
Holtz, a PhD student in the Centre for Language Evolution at the
University of Edinburgh. My project focuses on how cognitive biases that
operate at different levels of the linguistic system influence
typological word order patterns. In my research I use silent gesture and
artificial language learning experiments to observe these biases in
action during different types of language tasks. I’m happy to come to
your lab to talk about these results and/or these methods. Feel free to
contact me at annie.holtz@ed.ac.uk
(May 2022) Hello, I am Ishan
Singhal , a PhD Student in the Department of Cognitive Science at
IIT-Kanpur (India). My work looks at a way to unify findings in
attention, perception and consciousness science under the umbrella of
time. In my research, I am trying to create a framework where time
perception, timing of cognition and time-consciousness can inform each
other. This entails philosophical, empirical and computational
investigations. You can write to me at
ishan20@iitk.ac.in
(May 2022) My name is Jordan Wylie (email
jwylie@gradcenter.cuny.edu) and I’m a PhD candidate at CUNY
and incoming postdoc at Boston College. Broadly, my research examines
how moral norms and rules shape and constrain judgments and behavior. I
would focus on how curiosity for moral content drives information
gathering about the minds of people who are morally conflicted,
atypical, or unfamiliar (e.g., really bad or really good people), and
the individual differences in imaginative resistance and empathy that
moderate these relationships. I also have some work that looks at how
people reason about moral judgment when the descriptive norms of
enforcement and legal codification of rules are in tension. I’m happy to
talk about either of these projects individually or a more general
overview of my work.
(May 2022) Hi! I’m Ted
Sumers, a PhD student at Princeton University. My research focuses
on integrated models of communication and planning. I’m working on a new
formalism extending Lewis signaling games to contextual bandit settings,
framing communication in terms of the listener’s decision-theoretic
utility. Depending on the audience, I’m happy to focus my talk on
implications for psychology (e.g. quantifying relevance theory;
generics) or machine learning (e.g. language-capable autonomous agents;
value alignment), or a mix of both. You can reach me at
sumers@princeton.edu .
(May 2022) Hi there! My name is Alexis Smith-Flores (email
alexis-smith@ucsd.edu) and I’m a graduate student at UC San
Diego. My research focuses on how infants and children jointly use
social information and emotions to reason about objects, people, and
social interactions. My most recent projects ask about infants’
reasoning about social affiliation and emotion inferences, but have
previously worked on emotion false belief tracking and object
individuation. I am happy to talk about any and all lines of my
research!
(May 2022) Hi! My name is Rui Wang and I’m a PhD student at the
University of Cambridge. I’m currently working on a project to
investigate the link between executive functions and science subject
learning (especially the suppression of naive science thinking) across
different age groups. I would love to talk about my research if you are
also interested in executive functions and science thinking. You can
reach me at rw623@cam.ac.uk
(May 2022) Hi, I’m Bonan
Zhao, a PhD student at the University of Edinburgh. I have
computational (mostly Bayesian-symbolic) and experimental work on (1)
how people generalize one- and few-shot causal interactions between
objects (here),
(2) how causal concepts are chunk-and-used to bootstrap generalization
(here), and (3) what
perceptual cues affect causal role attribution (here). I’d
love to talk about any of them in a lab meeting. Please feel free to
reach me at b.zhao@ed.ac.uk.
(June 2022) Hello! My name is Dinara Talypova, and I am 2nd-year
PhD researcher at WU (Vienna University of Economics and Business),
Institute for Information Systems & Society. I work on the topic of
everyday creativity enhancement (with cognitive flexibility as a main
factor) with the help of immersive technologies, specifically Virtual
Reality (VR). My study is more applied than theoretical but I use 4E
cognition as my theoretical framework. You can reach me by
dinara.talypova@wu.ac.at
(July 2022) My name is Dae
Houlihan and I’m a PhD candidate at MIT. I study how people reason
about others’ emotions. My research frames emotion understanding as
causal reasoning over an intuitive theory of mind. I use probabilistic
programs to computationally model how perceptual cues and conceptual
knowledge mutually constrain inferences of others’ mental states. This
work argues that generative models of what observers predict that
someone is likely to feel in context are necessary both for
understanding human social cognition and for building computer systems
that approach human-level emotional intelligence. You can reach me at
daeda@mit.edu.
(September 2022) Hi! My name is Fenil Doshi and I’m a PhD student
at Harvard University. In my research, I am exploring the nature of
visual representations underlying mid-level vision by trying to
characterize the tuning and spatial topographies of proto-object
representations, and the kinds of mechanisms that can operate over it.
To this end, I combine computational models of vision, behavioral
psychophysics, and neuroimaging data to gain deeper insights into the
emergent neural and behavioral signatures of a hierarchical visual
processor. You can reach me at
fenil_doshi@fas.harvard.edu
(April 2023) Hi, my name is Tiwa Eisape. I am a PhD student at
MIT in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and the Computer
Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I study the algorithms
that underlie human language use. I am particularly interested in
resource rationality and computational modeling. My current work uses
recent advances in natural language processing, deep learning, and
neurosymbolic machine learning to model human-like production,
comprehension, and linguistic reasoning. You can reach me at
eisape@mit.edu
(July 2023) Hello! I’m Georgia-Ann Carter. I’m a PhD
student in the CDT for NLP at The University of Edinburgh. I study the
nature of semantic representations in both humans and machines, and how
context influences this. My current research combines behavioural and
computational methods to explore how linguistic context impacts the
processing mechanisms supporting comprehension, and whether engineered
representations are also sensitive to the same cues. You can reach me at
georgia.carter@ed.ac.uk