Showing posts with label Keynote. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Keynote. Show all posts

Sunday, July 14, 2013

Keynote 4: Cavanagh

Sunday July 14 17:30-18:30

Patrick Cavanagh (Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception, Université Paris Descartes) will deliver the fourth Keynote lecture.

Keynote 3: Kastner

Sunday July 14 09:15-10:30

Sabine Kastner (Dep’t of Psychology, Princeton University) will deliver the third keynote lecture.

Saturday, July 13, 2013

Keynote 2: Gallagher

Saturday July 13 17:30-18:30

Shaun Gallagher (Dep’t of Philosophy, University of Memphis) will deliver the second keynote address.

Keynote 1: Fried

Saturday July 13 09:00-10:00

Itzhak Fried (Neurosurgery, Psychiatry, and Biobehavioral Sciences, UCLA), will deliver the first keynote lecture.

Friday, July 6, 2012

Keynote 4: Perner

Friday, July 6 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre

Keynote 3: "Infants’ Sensitivity to Others’ Belief: Unconscious Theory of Mind?"

Josef Perner (University of Salzburg, Austria)

SUMMARY

At Sussex we (Clements & Perner 1994) discovered a dissociation. A majority of three year old children anticipate in their looking that an agent, who didn’t witness an object’s unexpected transfer to a new location will mistakenly return to the object’s original place. In contrast, when these children are asked where the agent will go to get the object, they adamantly claim that she will go to where the object actually is. Subsequent studies indicated that the dissociation is not one of explicit considerations between certain and uncertain possibilities (Ruffman et al 2001) and that not one between verbal and nonverbal measures. It also affects action responses that are given spontaneously and those that are given hesitantly. These results provided an analogy to the availability of unconscious (implicit) and conscious (explicit) knowledge in studies with blindsight patients and healthy adults with illusory stimuli and, thus, evidence for unconscious knowledge of a mistaken agent’s future action.

This dissociation has gained new relevance with reports that infants as young as 14 months (Onishi & Baillargeon 2005, and many studies since) or even 7 months (Kovács et al 2010) show similar sensitivity to belief in their looking and other spontaneous responses. Although the dissociation between spontaneous and deliberate responding has affinity with the distinction between unconscious and conscious knowledge, we have no good understanding what leaves the one un- and makes the other conscious. I will elaborate the idea that spontaneous responding is based on abstraction of behavioural regularities, which may be causally shallow (behaviour rules) or deep (belief formation), while deliberate responding is based on understanding the agent’s reasons for acting.

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Keynote 3: Singer

Thursday, July 5 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre

Keynote 3: "Social Emotions from the Lens of Social Neuroscience: Modulation, Development and Plasticity"

Tania Singer (Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany).

SUMMARY

With the emergence of social neuroscience, researchers have started to investigate the underpinnings of our ability to share and understand feelings of others. After a definition of concepts, I will shortly revise the main results of neuroscientific studies investigating empathic brain responses elicited by the observation of others in pain and show how these empathic brain responses are modulated by several contextual and stimulus intrinsic factors such as perceived fairness or ingroup/outgroup membership. Furthermore, I will present data from a novel paradigm on empathy for pleasant and unpleasant touch allowing the investigation of the neural mechanisms underlying affective egocentric bias in adults. These data will be complemented with developmental findings showing age-differences in egocentric bias, social emotions such as envy and Schadenfreude as well as strategic decision making during childhood. Finally, I present evidence of affective brain plasticity based on mental training of social emotions. These data will be discussed in lights of their relevance for recent models of social cognition.

Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Keynote 2: Rees

Wednesday, July 4 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre

Keynote 1: "Decoding consciousness"

Geraint Rees (University College London, UK)

SUMMARY

Everything we know about the world comes to us through our brain. Yet for each of us our own conscious mental world of thoughts and feelings is isolated and private. Despite several centuries of research on the brain, communication through language or gesture remains the only way we can discover the conscious thoughts and experiences of others. This makes it difficult to compare our conscious experiences and discover whether we all experience the world in the same way. In this talk I will discuss recent work using non-invasive brain imaging showing that not only does our conscious perception of the world differ across individuals, but also that these individual differences are correlated with the structure and function of primary visual, parietal and prefrontal cortices. I will explore the implications of these findings for both neuroscience and society.

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

Keynote 1: Bayne

Tuesday, July 3 2012 09:15-10:30 @ Dome theatre

Keynote 1: "The unity of consciousness"

Tim Bayne (University of Oxford, Oxford, UK)

SUMMARY

Some theorists maintain that consciousness is necessarily unified; others maintain that although consciousness is typically unified, the unity of consciousness can break down on occasions; and still others argues that the apparent unity of consciousness is an illusion, and that consciousness is typically disunified. This talk provides an overview of the debate between these three approaches to consciousness. I distinguish different forms that the unity of consciousness can take, and I provide some tentative reasons for thinking that there is a sense in which consciousness is necessarily unified. I conclude with a discussion of how debates about the unity of consciousness might inform the development and evaluation of theories of consciousness.