April 24, 2025 (5:00 pm, Lecture Center 108)
Chad Rogers (Union College)
Does age affect speech perception from the top-down? Evidence from brain and behavior
Classical studies in perception have often emphasized the hierarchical flow of information from the “bottom-up” or from the “top-down,” where “bottom-up” refers to basic sensory contributions to perception and “top-down” refers to complex perceptual inference. In speech perception, the role of non-sensory based inference in perception in part explains how the brain often decodes speech quickly, effortlessly, and with tremendous variation in sensory input. Older adults in particular may be the most likely major population demographic to benefit from non-sensory based inference in their daily perception of speech. The current talk presents several behavioral and neuroimaging experiments that examine the role and caveats of non-sensory based inference in young and older adults.
Dr. Chad Rogers is Associate Professor of Neuroscience at Union College (Schenectady, NY). His research focuses on speech perception, hearing loss and cognitive control, all of which are very important in aging; thus, much of his work involves older adult populations. His approach is based on applying fundamentals of cognitive psychology to issues in hearing science, with an emphasis on neuroscience.
April 30, 2025 (5:00 pm, Lecture Center 104)
Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi (University of Warsaw)
Where to look for language? (With notes on social and technological impacts)
Perspectives on what cognition is have begun to shift radically. Once it seemed that cognition was the private mental feat of a solitary problem-solving mind. Now, cognition appears newly invested in serving the action of a feeling body situated in the environment. Cognitive science’s shifting perspective on cognition from inward to outward, from individual to social has had profound effect on the theory of language and its relation to cognition. An individual mind equipped with computational machinery can be – at best – only a part of the story. These changes evoke Lev Vygotsky’s claim from almost 100 years ago, that “The origin of the symbolic forms of activity cannot be derived from (…) any other forms as long as we remain within the limits of individual psychology.” (Vygotsky, 1930/1978, p. 88). In the talk I would like to ask: how does cognitive science go beyond the private limits of an individual mind to understand the public workings of language? Is this a voyage in space or in time? The possible directions promise to transform our research on language but also bear applications to daily life, e.g., in designing voice-restorative technology or in assessing the impact of large language models (LLMs) on human interactions.
Dr. Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi is Professor of Psychology at the University of Warsaw, Poland. She is interested in human cognition as arising from interactions with others, situated in the world. She studies human language as a particularly good manifestation of this problem, employing three promising approaches: ecological psychology, dynamical systems, and semiotics.
The events are sponsored by the Department of Psychology and Campus Auxiliary Services.
