Cognitations Jay Richardson and Tanay Katiyar

Language is oftentimes viewed as a paradigmatically human capacity. Indeed, we have observed no other creature exhibit linguistic abilities with the same complexity and freedom as our own. Conversely, humans are often viewed as vitally linguistic. Our diverse societies and communities seem to be knit together by the thread of spoken, signed and written words. We tell stories, pass down documents, express our joys and grievances… all by articulating our thoughts into sequences of sounds, markings or gestures. It is therefore not surprising that the first words of a child tend to be celebrated. But what goes into the utterance of a first word? How does this develop into full-fledged linguistic communication? What role does the speech that can be heard in the child’s social environment play? How and why do we speak to children? How does all this vary from one culture to the next? Today's guests are the people to answer these questions, or at least some of them… 

Camilla Scaff is a post-doctoral researcher in the Human Ecology Group, at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine of the University of Zurich, Switzerland. She is simultaneously doing post doctoral work in the Language Acquisition Across Cultures (LAAC) group, Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique (LSCP), here at the Ecole normale supérieure of Paris, where she also did her PhD on the influence of socioeconomic and ecological factors on language acquisition, under the supervision of  Alejandrina Cristia. 

Alejandrina Cristia, then, is a CNRS research director at the Laboratoire de sciences cognitives et psycholinguistique. Her work is highly integrative, ambitiously bringing together different methods in order to pinpoint the processes by which we speak and understand language. For this work, she won the CNRS bronze medal and the John S. McDonnell Scholar Award in Understanding Human Cognition. She received her MA and PhD in linguistics at the University of Purdue. 

Links to the Con Ciencia podcast and the Kotoboo blog referenced in the episode:

Con ciencia:

https://soundcloud.com/radio-unahur/sets/con-ciencia

Kotoboo:

https://kotoboo.org/index.php/fr/

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Rohan Chowdhury

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Most actions humans take are social in nature. If they are not directly geared towards affecting others behaviors and thoughts, they are at least likely to have some impact on their lives. One can wonder if there is something special in one’s mind that determines the behaviors that are oriented towards others. After all, we do colloquially talk of social skills or social intelligence. So, what is so special about social behaviors? Another domain that makes the question painfully apparent is that of progress requiring collective action. Indeed, why are we so reliably capable of learning a difficult new skill, or getting a job, caring for our family – which are examples of things that require much practice and commitment – and why, at the same time, are we seeing large-scale inaction regarding climate change? How can the cognitive scientist explain this? What are the cognitive, neural and environmental determinants of our social capacities? What motivates us in our social lives? Today's guest is the person to answer these questions, or at least some of them… 

Coralie Chevalier,  a behavioral scientist at the Institut Jean-Nicod. After having done her PhD at University College London, she did multiple postdocs at the Center for Autism Research at the University of Pennsylvania, King’s College’s institute of psychiatry. During her career she has worked on many topics, both fundamental and applied: autism, social motivation, grit, climate change policy, and much more…

 

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Our daily experiences (e.g. thinking, acting, talking to people etc.) give us the idea that we/our mind is a singular entity i.e. a unified inner space or soul that perceives and acts on the complex world around us. On the other hand, we tend to speak in ways that point to a relative segmentation of the mind – one often hears that some individuals are particularly talented at solving mathematical equations, that women are more empathic than men, that some children have a very rich imagination and are hence destined for a creative line of work. These ideas, although pernicious in some cases, point to an intuition that has historically been very important for the scientific study of the mind: that our mental capacities are somewhat independent from one another and that some of them come to us naturally to varying degrees. Observing patients with localized brain injuries and the development of scientific methods and technologies facilitating the study of specific capacities in relative isolation from others have allowed us to finesse this intuition, taking it out of the realm of scattered speculations into the scientific one. Which mental capacities can be isolated, and where are they localized in the brain? How can we investigate these locations? What are the consequences of this line of research for how we conceive of the mind more generally? Does it open up venues for understanding atypical cognition? Today’s guest is the person to answer all of these questions, or at least some of them…

She is Nancy Kanwisher. She is the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a founding member of the McGovern Institute. She received her B.S. and PhD from MIT. After her Ph.D. she held a MacArthur Fellowship in Peace and International Security for two years. She joined the MIT faculty in 1997, and prior to that served on the faculty at UCLA and Harvard University. Her lab has contributed to the identification and characterization of a number of regions in the human brain that conduct very specific cognitive functions. She is the recipient of numerous awards in the academy, the most recent being the Jean Nicod Prize, awarded annually in Paris to a leading empirically oriented philosopher of mind or philosophically oriented cognitive scientist.





Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

What is normal? What is a disorder? Often, when we interact with people who behave in ways we cannot understand, the question of defining  ‘normal’ and sane behaviour becomes apparent. Importantly, when we ourselves exhibit  thoughts and behaviours which are viewed as deviant from the commonly accepted definition of normality, we might feel helpless, judged, and inadequate. Historically, behaviours that are diagnostic of mental disorders were viewed as irrational or disruptive. However, recent breakthroughs in cognitive science can shed new light on redefining psychiatric phenomena while erasing the stigma of irrationality. What are these breakthroughs? What goes into elucidating the nature and causes of the many psychological troubles with which one can be faced? Are delusions and other kinds of thoughts really irrational?  

He is Sam Wilkinson, a senior lecturer in philosophy at the department of sociology, philosophy and anthropology at the University of Exeter in the United-Kingdom. He received his PhD at Edinburgh University and did a postdoc at Durham University on the phenomenon of hearing voices. Currently, he is visiting the Institut Jean Nicod. His work lies at the intersection of the philosophy of cognitive science and the philosophy of psychiatry. He has published papers on the topics of predictive processing approaches to studying cognition, psychosis, hallucinations, trauma, and much more.

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Mathieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

A defining feature of us humans is that we continuously adapt to our environments in order to thrive. One key component of this process is ‘learning’ the contingencies of our environment. Since the 19th century, this phenomenon has been studied under the moniker of “conditioning”, and is usually associated with Pavlov and his famed dogs. Despite the fact that this seems trivial to many today with regard to dogs and other animals, and that we cannot assume that humans, with their complex mental lives merely act with the prospect of a reward, the basic idea behind these principles has enjoyed increasing success when applied to the study of the mind. This prompts the following questions: what influence does reward and punishment have on our behaviour? How do the decisions we make based on these principles tie into collective action and economic activity? How do they influence the ways in which we think? Today’s guest, Stefano Palminteri, is the person to answer all of these questions, or at least some of them…

He is research director (full professor) and heads the Human Reinforcement Learning team at the cognitive and computational neuroscience laboratory situated at the ENS. Alongside his research, he teaches a course on neuroeconomics. Previously, he studied Pharmaceutical Biotechnology and cognitive neuroscience before holding various post-doctoral positions in Paris, Trento and London. He is also a member of the European Laboratory of Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS) Society and the Cercle FSER. He has recently wongrants to work on the dynamics of decision-making, learning and the effects of memory on these processes



Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Rohan Chowdhury

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar

Our relationship with our body is extremely complex. We have a wide range of different kinds of sensations: that is, the senses, pains, pleasures, the feeling of heat, of cold and so on. We also do things with our body, we engage in athletic activities, we harm one another, we pleasure one another, we jump for joy, we frown in disbelief, we hunch over in despair… How can we disentangle this giant knot of doings and feelings that is the body? How can we study our perception of the body? What is the relationship between the body and its environment? Today's guest is the person to answer all these questions, or at least some of them.

Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS senior researcher in philosophy in Paris. She is the deputy director of the Institut Jean Nicod as well as a philosophy scholar in residence at NYU Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. Her major current works focus on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, and social cognition. She has published widely in philosophy and psychology journals on the first-person, body schema, agency, empathy, and more recently on pain. Her new book, Mind the Body (Oxford University Press, 2018), provides the first comprehensive treatment of bodily awareness and of the sense of bodily ownership, combining philosophical analysis with recent experimental results from cognitive science.

Credits:

Interview: Tanay Katiyar and Jay Richardson

Artwork: Ella Bergru

Editing: Matthieu Fraticelli

Music: Thelma Samuel and Robin Baradel

Communication: Tanay Katiyar