Cognitive Science series

Dr. William Calvin

Dr. William Calvin, a professor in the Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Washington will be first of five speakers in February for the new Cognitive Science weekly lecture series, hosted by the Linguistics Department. 

Calvin will speak from 6:30 to 8 p.m.Tuesday, Feb. 3, on "Cerebral Circuits for Creativity: Bootstrapping Coherence using a Darwin Machine." The lecture will be in the Alice Peters Auditorium of the Peters Business Building .

February speakers from Fresno State are: Feb. 5, Chris Golston, Linguistics; Feb. 12, Michael Wolf, Philosophy; and Feb. 19, Lorin Lachs, Psychology. On  Feb. 26, Dr. Joel Lachter of the NASA Ames Research Center in Mountain View will speak. These four  lectures will be in Science 147 from 6:30 to 9:20 p.m.

Cognitive Science is an interdisciplinary area of study focusing on cognition: How we think about and perceive the world, the nature of thought itself and how we can model the ways in which we think or perceive. 

A minor program in the area of Cognitive Science will be established in the fall of 2004 at Fresno State .   The development of the Cognitive Science major is ongoing.

Calvin is the author of a number of popular and scientific books on Cognitive Science and the evolution of the mind.   Some of his recent titles include "A Brief History of the Mind: From Apes to Intellect and Beyond," "A Brain for All Seasons: Human Evolution and Abrupt Climate Change," "The Cerebral Code" and "How Brains Think."

He has also written articles for the Atlantic Monthly, Scientific American and Behavioral and Brain Sciences, among others.  

Dr. Joel Lachter

Lachter will speak Feb. 26. His topic is "Where did Broadbent go wrong? Measuring the allocation of processing resources."

In " Perception and Communication," Broadbent put forth one of the first unified theories of human cognition. In this talk, Lachter will review Broadbent's theory focusing on the following four claims: very little information can be processed simultaneously; an attentional filter is located between low level processing of physical properties and higher level processing of semantic properties; filtered (unattended) information is not processed semantically; and the spatial locus of the filter can be shifted two or three times a second;

Lachter will argue that the data taken as evidence for semantic processing of unattended information is instead due to shifts of attention.

Lachter is the author of a number of scientific papers on visual perception, with recent papers appearing in Psychological Review, Visual Cognition, Journal of Experimental Psychology, Perception, and Cognition.   He completed his PhD at the University of Rochester in 1994.

The Cognitive Science lecture schedule (subject to change) can be found at http://zimmer.csufresno.edu/~wlewis/NewCourses/CogSci-Seminar.htm .  

For more information contact William Lewis in Linguistics at 8-2441.