“A Social Affective Neuroscience Perspective on Health Goals”

Elliot Berkman, PhD
University of Oregon

Friday, April 26th, 2013
3:00 PM
Martin Colloquium Center
4127 Sennott Square

Abstract:

Studies on health goals such as smoking cessation and dieting have
traditionally drawn upon theoretical models from social psychology about
motivation, self-regulation, and persuasion, among many others. Since the
integration of neuroscience methods (e.g., functional magnetic resonance
imaging) into social psychology, many of the psychological models that
have informed research on health goals have been revisited in light of a
growing understanding of their underlying neural systems. However, these
neurally informed models are only beginning to be re-applied to
understanding how people pursue health goals, which conditions foster
success or failure, and how the ability to pursue health goals might be
improved. Furthermore, the few investigations there are in this area are limited to brief laboratory sessions and typically do not examine real-world outcomes. I will present data from three lines of work in my laboratory that use neuroscience to
complement and extend traditional ways of studying health goals, their
underlying neurocognitive processes, and their long-term outcomes. First,
I will describe how neural data on a skill critical to cigarette-smoking
cessation, self-control, can predict real-life cessation outcomes. Second,
I will discuss how some of the same neural regions predictive of smoking cessation are
also involved in the self-regulation of food craving and are predictive of
energy-dense food intake in a naturalistic setting. And third, I will
present a validation study of a training protocol that we developed based
on knowledge about the brain systems that support self-control. Together,
these three lines of work highlight how a neurally informed model of
health goals can generate new insights and directions for intervention.

Reception to follow in Room 4125 Sennott Square

Marc H. Schieber, MD, PhD
Professor
Departments of Neurology, Neurobiology & Anatomy,
Brain & Cognitive Sciences, Visual Sciences and Biomedical Engineering
University of Rochester
School of Medicine and Dentistry
Rochester, NY

Thursday, April 11, 2013
2:00pm
6014 Biomedical Science Tower 3

Jessica Cantlon, Ph.D.
Brain & Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester

Thursday, April 25, 2013
4:00 pm
Social Room, Mellon Institute

Math, Monkeys, and the Developing Brain
Thirty thousand years ago, humans kept track of numerical quantities by carving slashes on fragments of bone. There were no numerals and the counting system as we know it did not exist. What cognitive abilities enabled our ancestors to record tallies and conceive of counting in the first place? And, what is the physical substrate in the brain that makes quantitative thinking possible? Our research aims to discover the origins and organization of numerical concepts in humans using clues from child development, the organization of the human brain, and animal cognition. We argue that there is continuity between ancient and modern human numerical concepts in terms of their fundamental cognitive and neural processes.

Michael Shadlen, M.D., Ph.D.
Professor and HHMI Investigator
Kavli Institute of Brain Science
Department of Neuroscience
Columbia University

Thursday, April 4, 2013
4:00 p.m.
328 Mellon Institute

Language for communication: Language comprehension and the communicative basis of word order

Ted Gibson, Ph.D.
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Friday, April 5th, 2013
3:00 PM
Martin Colloquium Center
4127 Sennott Square

Perhaps the most obvious hypothesis for the function of human language is for use in communication. Chomsky has famously argued that this is a flawed hypothesis, because of the existence of such phenomena as ambiguity. Furthermore, he argues that the kinds of things that people tend to say are not short and simple, as would be predicted by communication theory. Contrary to Chomsky, my group applies information theory and communication theory from Shannon (1948) in order to attempt to explain the typical usage of language in comprehension and production, together with the structure of languages themselves. First, we show that ambiguity out of context is not only not a problem for an information-theoretic approach to language, it is a feature. Second, we show that language comprehension appears to function as a noisy channel process, in line with communication theory. Given si, the intended sentence, and sp, the perceived sentence we propose that people maximize P(si | sp ), which is equivalent to maximizing the product of the prior P(si) and the likely noise processes P(si → sp ). We show that several predictions of this way of thinking of language are true: (1) the more noise that is needed to edit from one alternative to another leads to lower likelihood that the alternative will be considered; (2) in the noise process, deletions are more likely than insertions; (3) increasing the noise increases the reliance on the prior (semantics); and (4) increasing the likelihood of implausible events decreases the reliance on the prior. Third, we show that this way of thinking about language leads to a simple re-thinking of the P600 from the ERP literature. The P600 wave was originally proposed to be due to people’s sensitivity to syntactic violations, but there have been many instances of problematic data in the literature for this interpretation. We show that the P600 can best be interpreted as sensitivity to an edit in the signal, in order to make it more easily interpretable. Finally, we discuss how thinking of language as communication can explain aspects of the origin of word order. Some recent evidence suggests that subject-object-verb (SOV) may be the default word order for human language. For example, SOV is the preferred word order in a task where participants gesture event meanings (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008). Critically, SOV gesture production occurs not only for speakers of SOV languages, but also for speakers of SVO languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish (Goldin-Meadow et al. 2008) and Italian (Langus & Nespor, 2010). The gesture-production task therefore plausibly reflects default word order independent of native language. However, this leaves open the question of why there are so many SVO languages (41.2% of languages; Dryer, 2005). We propose that the high percentage of SVO languages cross-linguistically is due to communication pressures over a noisy channel. We provide several gesture experiments consistent with this hypothesis, and we speculate how a noisy channel approach might explain several typical word order patterns that occur in the world’s languages.

Reception to follow in Room 4125 Sennott Square

Wednesday, April 10, 2013
John Williams, Ph.D., Vollum Institute
Acute Desensitization of Opioid Receptors
3:30 p.m.
Mellon Institute Conference Room

Stephen J. Smith, PhD
Professor
Department of Molecular and Cellular Physiology
Stanford University School of Medicine
Stanford, CA

Tuesday
April 16, 2013
4:00pm
1495 Biomedical Science Tower

Monday, April 1st at noon
340B Baker Hall

Title: “A Cognitive System for Visual Intelligence”

Abstract: Inasmuch as humans understand their surroundings by coupling perception with knowledge, cognitive-inspired visual systems need to integrate optical features and vision algorithms with suitable world knowledge. In this talk I will present an integrated cognitive system for automatic classification of human actions.

Maura Boldrini, M.D., Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Psychiatry
Columbia University
Research Scientist
Molecular Imaging and Neuropathology Division
New York State Psychiatric Institute

“Adult Hippocampal Neurogenesis and Major Depression”

Monday, April 8, 2013
12:00-1:00 PM
16th Floor Conference Room (1695)
Biomedical Science Tower

Sponsored by the Translational Neuroscience Program and Department of Psychiatry

For an updated list of TNP Seminars, please visit http://www.tnp.pitt.edu/ and click on the Past & Future link below the TNP Seminars icon.

Jessica Cantlon will deliver the Cowan Young Investigator Lecture on April 25th. Her cv is attached, and talk information is below. If you are interested in meeting with her, please send me your availability on 4/25.

Jessica Cantlon, Ph.D.
Brain & Cognitive Sciences
University of Rochester

Thursday, April 25, 2013
4:00 pm
Social Room, Mellon Institute

Math, Monkeys, and the Developing Brain

Thirty thousand years ago, humans kept track of numerical quantities by carving slashes on fragments of bone. There were no numerals and the counting system as we know it did not exist.What cognitive abilities enabled our ancestors to record tallies and conceive of counting in the first place? And, what is the physical substrate in the brain that makes quantitative thinking possible? Our research aims to discover the origins and organization of numerical concepts in humans using clues from child development, the organization of the human brain, and animal cognition.We argue that there is continuity between ancient and modern human numerical concepts in terms of their fundamental cognitive and neural processes.