How do humans conceptualize time? One clear pattern is that temporal concepts are based on spatial ones, however how this is done is not universally determined in the human brain and varies significantly across cultures.
What information can young children use to aid them in understanding spoken language? Recent work in the Creel lab shows that preschoolers are able to use who is talking to limit the set of things that person might talk about.
Though prediction has been proposed across a variety of neural domains, language has not traditionally been one of them - until recently. Using event-related brain potentials, we show that prediction is part and parcel of sentence comprehension.
Artificial agents such as humanoid robots and interactive animated characters are rapidly becoming participants in many aspects of social and cultural life. With applications in domains such as education and health care, we need to understand human factors guiding our perceptions of and interactions with these agents.
Inhibitory control is the ability to withhold or modify prepotent or planned actions that are no longer appropriate in a behavioral context. We are studying the computational and neurophysiological basis of inhibitory control in healthy individuals and those affected by conditions such as ADHD and stimulant abuse.
The ability to recall our experiences as they evolved over time is truly an impressive feat accomplished in large part through the working of a thumb-sized portion of the brain called the hippocampus. How the brain encodes memories is a difficult, but exciting and burgeoning area of neuroscientific research.
People drive more poorly when they're talking on the phone. What is it about having a conversation that interferes with steering, changing gears, and noticing brake lights?
We introduce a system to aid the process of data collection and analysis during observational research by providing non-intrusive automatic capture of paper-based annotations.
The introduction of computer workstations into the medical interview process makes it important to consider the impact of such technology on older patients as well as new types of interfaces that may better suit the needs of older adults.
ChronoViz is a system to aid annotation, visualization, navigation, and analysis of multimodal time-coded data. Exploiting interactive paper technology, ChronoViz also integrates researcher's paper notes into the composite data set. The goal is to decrease the time and effort required to analyze multimodal data by providing direct indexing and flexible mechanisms to control data exploration.
Speech carries both linguistic content – phonemes, words, sentences – and talker information, sometimes called ‘indexical information’. While talker variability materially affects language processing, it has historically been regarded as a curiosity rather than a central influence, possibly because talker variability does not fit with a conception of speech sounds as abstract categories. Despite this relegation to the periphery, a long history of research suggests that phoneme perception and talker perception are interrelated. The current review argues that speech perception itself may arise from phylogenetically earlier vocal recognition, and discusses evidence that many cues to talker identity are also cues to speech-sound identity. Rather than brushing talker differences aside, explicit examination of the role of talker variability and talker identity in language processing can illuminate our understanding of the origins of spoken language, and the nature of language representations themselves.
In 2005, DeLong, Urbach, and Kutas took advantage of the a/an English indefinite article phonological alternation
and the sensitivities of the N400 ERP component to show that readers can neurally preactivate individual words of a
sentence (including nouns and their prenominal indefinite articles) in a graded fashion with a likelihood estimated from
the words’ offline probabilities as sentence continuations. Here we report an additional finding from that study: a
prolonged ERP frontal positivity to less probable noun continuations.We suggest that this positivity is consistent with
hypotheses that additional neural processing may be invoked when highly expected continuations are not encountered
in the input and speculate briefly on possible functional correlates.
We review the discovery, characterization, and evolving use of the
N400, an event-related brain potential response linked to meaning
processing. We describe the elicitation of N400s by an impressive
range of stimulus types—including written, spoken, and signed words or
pseudowords; drawings, photos, and videos of faces, objects, and
actions; sounds; and mathematical symbols—and outline the sensitivity
of N400 amplitude (as its latency is remarkably constant) to
linguistic and nonlinguistic manipulations. We emphasize the
effectiveness of the N400 as a dependent variable for examining almost
every aspect of language processing and highlight its expanding use to
probe semantic memory and to determine how the neurocognitive system
dynamically and flexibly uses bottom-up and top-down information to
make sense of the world. We conclude with different theories of the
N400's functional significance and offer an N400-inspired
reconceptualization of how meaning processing might unfold.
This is an upper-level undergraduate course focused on the design of gesture-based intearction techniques. The course will cover original research in HCI on various gesture-based input techniques, including mouse, pen, touch, and whole-body interaction. Students will work in small teams to complete prototyping activities related to various gesture-based techniques.
Human language is unlike any other naturally occurring communication system. It’s expressive, flexible, and in principle limitless. It’s also dirty.
This class is an introduction to language through the lens of its dark underbelly. We’ll look at vulgarities, taboo words, and epithets. They will tell us a lot about how people learn language, how they pronounce words, how they put words together into sentences, how they understand meaning, and why language changes over time.
There are no prerequisites for this course. However, students who believe they could be offended by the study of swearing and other taboo language might not find this course appropriate for them, and are encouraged not to enroll.
The Laboratory for Intelligent and Safe Automobiles (LISA) is a multidisciplinary effort to explore innovative approaches to making future automobiles safer and "intelligent". Our research considers issues in sensing, analysis, modeling, and prediction of parameters associated with drivers, occupants, vehicle dynamics and vehicle surroundings as well as transportation infrastructures. This ...
Learning a second language is difficult, and we want to help make it easier. As a 199 research assistant, you would have the opportunity to participate in the development of a new online system for second language learning. We are using tools from computational linguistics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning, ...
Computational Psycholinguistics Lab. We study how language comprehension unfolds in real time through psycholinguistic experiments. Duties include preparing experimental sentences, recruiting participants, running experiments, compiling results and assisting with analysis. Training is provided on these tasks, and you will learn a lot about both the structure of language and human ...
The Language Acquisition & Sound Research lab is seeking enthusiastic, motivated, and reliable undergraduate research assistants to assist with a study. The study investigates how different people interpret sounds when processing language. Successful applicants will receive course credit and gain valuable experience with language research! Interested students should contact Carolyn ...
People witness, experience, and describe hundreds of events every day. These events are then encoded into memory and recalled as needed. This project focuses on the factors which can affect this encoding and subsequent recall. We are specifically interested in the extent to which speaking a particular language--Spanish or English--can ...
Are children really better than adults at learning languages, and why? Learning even one language presents a challenge: children must figure out what sounds are meaningfully different and what sounds are not. This gets very complicated when children grow up learning more than one language! Researchers are very interested in ...
A number of brain regions have been linked to emotion processing, perception, and expression in EEG and functional imaging studies. However, structural correlates of these processes are not well understood, and individual differences in the development of these processes are even less clear. One potential obstacle to understanding these developmental ...
The Language Acquisition & Sound Research lab is seeking enthusiastic, motivated, and reliable undergraduate research assistants to assist with a study. The study investigates how different people (monolinguals and bilinguals) interpret sounds when processing language. Successful applicants will receive course credit and gain valuable experience with language research! If interested, ...
A number of brain regions have been linked to emotion processing, perception, and expression in EEG and functional imaging studies. However, structural correlates of these processes are not well understood, and individual differences in the development of these processes are even less clear. The Center for Human Development is looking ...
We are evaluating two interventions for dyslexia that involve training the temporal dynamics of the visual system (magnocellular pathway) and the auditory system, and whether the two interventions together have super-additive effects. As a Research Assistant, you would be traveling to one or two of five participating local elementary schools ...
EEG/ERP Studies of Sensory and Attentional Processing in Typical and Atypical Development. We are studying attention and sensory processing in children and adults with typical and atypical development (e.g., autism). Students will learn to design experiments and collect and analyze Event-Related Potential (ERP) data. Each quarter's emphasis will be slightly ...
Get involved with eyetracking studies that explore language development in children. Duties will include testing children and adults in eyetracking and behavioral studies, recruiting children, data entry, preparing experimental stimuli, and attending lab meetings.
Human speech proceeds at an extremely rapid rate. In order to successfully understand language, the comprehension system must be able to extract meaning from speech as quickly as it comes in. To some extent, speech comprehension thus must involve predicting upcoming words and the information they convey before they have ...
Celebrated conceptual artist and CalArts Professor Charles Gaines engages in a conversation with Dr. Rafael Nunez, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego.
This grant is part of a project funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF grant DUE-0942497) that provides free access to educational tools in cognitive neuroscience. The goCognitive website hosts interviews with well-known researchers in cognitive neuroscience as part of its video archive.
The Institute for International, Comparative, and Area Studies (IICAS) at UC San Diego is pleased to announce a competition for 2012-13 Undergraduate Student Research Travel Grants to support senior honors thesis research by undergraduates in international, comparative, and area studies.
The Toddler Developmental Disabilities Clinic at the Yale Child Study Center in the Yale School of Medicine is interested in recruiting highly qualified students from the University of California, San Diego for an exciting new pre-doctoral fellowship for current graduates or graduating seniors. The position will commence June 2012 and will be 2 years in duration.
Mayor Sanders and the City of San Diego are challenging the software developer community to create new apps using city and partner data. They’re also inviting the public to share their ideas for innovative new apps.
Google is proud to announce the 2012 Google Anita Borg Memorial Scholarship, awarding a group of female students each a $10,000 scholarship for the 2012-2013 academic year.
Associate or Full Professor in Human Computer Interaction (HCI)
DEPARTMENT OF COGNITIVE SCIENCE AT UCSD
The Department of Cognitive Science (http://cogsci.ucsd.edu) within the Division of Social Sciences at the University of California, San Diego is committed to academic excellence and diversity within the faculty, staff, and student body. The department invites applications for a new faculty position in human-computer interaction. The department has a preference for a senior researcher to be appointed at the associate or full professor level, but will also consider junior candidates. Appointment begins July 1, 2012.
Like other new scientific enterprises, studies within evolutionary linguistics vary widely. While some argue that language owes its phylogenetic explanation to simple brain evolution (i.e., biological evolution); others promote a view that language is a complex meme replicated through acquisition, and hence has evolved to be a better replicator for the brain (cultural evolution). These divisions reflect the notorious polarization of the nature-nurture problem. Unlike traditional linguistics, however, the intersection of the two camps, ...
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Tue, Feb 14th, 4:00pm-5:00pm (CSB 280)
(1 day, 16 hours from now)
The spatiotemporal dynamics of neuronal systems remains a challenging and important topic in theoretical neuroscience. To understand complex dynamics, it is necessary to start from controllable systems, such as excitable chemical systems and small neuronal networks. In my talk, I will begin with the control of spatiotemporal dynamics of photosensitive Belousov-Zhabotinsky (BZ) systems. Due to their amenability to experimental control and theoretical analyses, photosensitive BZ systems have been serving as ideal model systems ...
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Thu, Feb 16th, 12:30pm-1:30pm (San Diego Supercomputer Center, East Annex South Wing, Level B1, EB-129)
(3 days, 12 hours from now)
