Alexandra (Sasha) Key | Professor, Marcus Autism Center, Emory University School of Medicine 
"Building a functional communication system: Does the baby have a say?" 

For a long time, language development has been framed mainly in the context of nature-nurture interactions. However, research in non-typical development suggests that another critical contributor should be considered. In this talk, I will present findings from neurophysiological studies in infants and children to demonstrate the importance of self-initiated active engagement with spoken communication for supporting more optimal developmental outcomes. Our data will demonstrate that choosing to engage with speech, an indication of social motivation, is an integral part of the previously established associations between the neural systems and the environmental factors contributing to individual differences in language development. Expanding the general conceptual approach to language to include nature-nurture-person will allow us to better understand the sources of variability in functional communication abilities across the full spectrum of developmental outcomes.

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Anna Ivanova | Assistant Professor, School of Psychology | Georgia Tech College of Sciences 
"Dissociating Language and Thought in Humans and in Machines" 

“What is the relationship between language and thought? This question has long intrigued researchers across scientific fields. In this talk, I will propose a framework for clarifying the language-thought relationship. I will introduce a distinction between formal competence—knowledge of linguistic rules and patterns—and functional competence—understanding and using language in the world. This distinction is grounded in human neuroscience, where a wealth of evidence indicates that formal competence relies on a set of specialized brain regions (“the language network”), whereas functional competence requires the use of multiple non-language-specific neural systems. I will then present a series of case studies illustrating how the formal/functional competence distinction can help (a) delineate the functional architecture of the human brain, providing a framework for studying complex cognitive behaviors, such as computer coding and legal reasoning; (b) understand the capabilities and limitations of today’s large language models, particularly in the realm of general world knowledge.”

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Leah Krubitzer | MacArthur Fellow   Professor of Psychology | University of California, Davis
"Combinatorial Creatures: Cortical Plasticity Within and Across Lifetimes" 

"The neocortex is one of the most distinctive structures of the mammalian brain, yet also one of the most varied in terms of both size and organization. Multiple processes have contributed to this variability including evolutionary mechanisms (i.e., changes in gene sequence) that alter the size, organization and connections of the neocortex, and activity dependent mechanisms that can also modify these same features over shorter time scales. Because the neocortex does not develop or evolve in a vacuum, when considering how different cortical phenotypes emerge within a species and across species over time, it is also important to consider alterations to the body, to behavior, and the environment in which an individual develops. Thus, changes to the neocortex can arise via different mechanisms, and over multiple time scales. Brains can change across large, evolutionary time scales of thousands to millions of years; across shorter time scales such as generations; and across the life of an individual – day-by-day, within hours, minutes and even on a time scale of a second. The combination of genetic and activity dependent mechanisms that create a given cortical phenotype allows the mammalian neocortex to rapidly and flexibly adjust to different body and environmental contexts, and in humans permits culture to impact brain construction during development."

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Ivana Ilic | Music Theory, Emory University
Jasna Veličković | Composer and Performer

"How Do We Know It's Music? On Musical Capacities of the Electromagnetic Field" 

What happens when the electromagnetic signal is not only deliberately made audible, but also exploited with a specifically musical aim? In this presentation, I investigate the distinctively musical use of electromagnetism in art from the 1960s until the present day. The two case studies include the works by Christina Kubisch (b. 1948) and Jasna Veličković (b. 1974). While the two artists share a commitment to a modernist quest for new sounds, they investigate the musical capacities of the electromagnetic field in distinctive ways. Kubisch operates primarily as a sound artist, within the audio-visual realm. Her installations include induction coils whose sounds are picked up by the visitors through specially designed headphones. The “musicality” of those works arises from the visitors’ movement within the exhibition space and appears as a completely individual and internalized event. As a composer, she also “finds” music in the sounding of electromagnetic fields that she explores in various places throughout the world. Veličković works from a predominantly auditory perspective. Her unambiguously musical creative process assumes both the compositional application of interference and its inclusion in a purposefully musical performance. The two artists’ approaches meet in an embodied reality of an intense and unique musical experience.

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Richard Moore | Executive Director, Children in Crossfire
"Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland"

Dr. Moore’s talk is part of the CMBC's Spring 2024 sponsored course “Empathy, Theater and Social Change” taught by Dr. Lisa Paulsen and Dr. Brendan Ozawa-de Silva.

This lunch talk was Co-sponsored by Emory’s Center for Contemplative Science and Compassion-Based Ethics & Woodward Academy

“Freedom, Forgiveness and Reconciliation: Lessons from Northern Ireland”

Dr. Richard Moore was blinded at the age of ten by a British soldier during the height of the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1972. Despite this horrific experience, Richard chose forgiveness over revenge, and he later befriended the soldier who shot him. In this talk, Dr. Moore will share his powerful story of healing and reconciliation, exploring the various dimensions of forgiveness as an emotion, a disposition, and a decision, and the potential of forgiveness in mending communities torn apart by conflict. He will also discuss the role that “educating the heart” for empathy and compassion can play in overcoming hatred and division, drawing from his work with the nonprofit he founded, Children in Crossfire, and his forthcoming book Freedom in Forgiveness.

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Arkarup Banerjee | School of Biological Science / Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, NY 
"Neural Circuits for Vocal Communication: Insights from the Singing Mice." 

My long-standing interest is to understand how circuits of interacting neurons give rise to natural, adaptive behaviors. Using vocal communication behavior across rodent species, my lab at CSHL pursues two complementary questions. How does the auditory system interact with the motor system to generate the fast sensorimotor loop required for vocal communication? What are the neural circuit modifications that allow behavioral novelty to emerge during evolution? In this talk, I will introduce you to the rich vocal life of the Costa-Rican singing mice. Next, I will describe a series of experiments that were performed to demonstrate the role of the motor cortex in controlling vocal flexibility in this species. In closing, I will discuss our ongoing efforts to identify neural circuit differences between singing mice and lab mice using high-throughput connectomics. Together, by combining neural circuit analysis of a natural behavior with comparative evolutionary analyses across species, we stand to gain insight into the function and evolution of neural circuits for social behaviors.

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Jack Gallant (Psychology, Electrical Engineering, and Computer Science / University of California, Berkeley)
"The Distributed Conceptual Network in the Human Brain"

Human behavior is based on a complex interaction between perception, stored knowledge, and continuous evaluation of the world relative to plans and goals. Even seemingly simple tasks such as watching a movie or listening to a story involve a range of different perceptual and cognitive processes whose underlying circuitry is broadly distributed across the brain. One important aspect of this system— the representation of conceptual knowledge in the brain—has been an intense topic of research in cognitive neuroscience for the past 40 years. A recent line of neuroimaging research from my lab has produced highly detailed, high-dimensional functional maps of modal and amodal (or multimodal) semantic representations in individual participants. Based on these findings, we propose a new Distributed Conceptual Network (DCN) theory that encompasses previous theories and accounts for recent data. The DCN theory holds that conceptual representations in the human brain are distributed across multiple modal sensory networks and (at least) one distributed amodal (or multimodal) conceptual network. Information from the modal sensory networks interfaces with the amodal network through a set of parallel semantically-selective channels. The amodal network is also influenced by information stored in long-term memory, which enters the network via the ATL. Finally, executive functions such as selective attention modulate conceptual representations depending on current behavioral goals and plans. We propose that the distributed conceptual system may be the scaffold for conscious experience and working memory, and that it subserves many diverse cognitive functions.

Jack Gallant is the Class of 1940 Chair at the University of California at Berkeley. He holds appointments in the Departments of Psychology and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, and is a member of the programs in Neuroscience, Vision Science, Bioengineering and Biophysics. He is a senior member of the IEEE, and served as the 2022 Chair of the IEEE Brain Community. Professor Gallant's research focuses on high-resolution functional mapping and quantitative computational modeling of human brain networks. His lab has created the most detailed current functional maps of human brain networks mediating vision, language comprehension and navigation, and they have used these maps to decode and reconstruct perceptual experiences directly from brain activity. Further information about ongoing work in the Gallant lab, links to talks and papers and links to online interactive brain viewers can be found at http://gallantlab.org.
 

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Claire White | Religious Studies, California State University, Northridge
"An Introduction to the Cognitive Science of Religion"

In recent decades, a new scientific approach to understanding, explaining, and predicting many features of religion has emerged. The cognitive science of religion (CSR) has amassed research on the forces that shape the tendency for humans to be religious and on what forms belief takes. It suggests that religion, like language or music, naturally emerges in humans with tractable similarities. This new approach has profound implications for understanding religion, including why it appears so easily and why people are willing to fight―and die―for it. Yet it is not without its critics, and some fear that scholars are explaining the ineffable mystery of religion away or showing that religion is natural proves or disproves the existence of God. This talk provides an accessible overview of CSR, outlining key findings and debates that shape it.

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Harvey Whitehouse | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"Against Interpretive Exclusivism"

Interpretive exclusivism is the claim that studying cultural systems is exclusively an interpretive exercise, ruling out reductive explanation and scientific methods. Following the lead of Robert N. McCauley and E. Thomas Lawson, I will argue that the costs of interpretive exclusivism are heavy and the benefits illusory. By contrast, the intellectual benefits of combining interpretivist and scientific approaches are striking. By generating rich descriptive accounts of our social and cultural worlds using interpretive methods, we are better able to develop precise and testable hypotheses, increasing the value and relevance of a qualitative approach to the more quantitative branches of social science focusing on causal inference. Interpretive scholarship can also contribute to the design of experiments, surveys, longitudinal studies, and database construction. By helping to strengthen the scientific foundations of social science, the interpretive enterprise can also make itself more relevant to society at large, to the policy community, and to the marginalized and oppressed groups it frequently purports to represent or defend. Since science is an inherently generalizing and inclusive activity, working more closely with the scientific community will help to make the methods of interpretive scholarship more transparent, reproducible, and accessible to all.

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Emma Cohen | Anthropology, University of Oxford, UK
"From Social Synchrony To Social Energetics. Or, Why There's Plenty Left in the Tank"

Thirty years ago, in an article entitled Crisis of Conscience, Riddle of Identity, Bob McCauley and Tom Lawson powerfully critiqued the “hermeneutic exclusivism” that by then prevailed in anthropology and the history of religions. When I read the article as a new doctoral student in anthropology, it blew my mind - and it helped me find my feet. In this talk, I’ll reflect on its seminal influence in my research within and beyond anthropology and religion and summarize some of our work on the causes and consequences of social bonding in a variety of contexts. Bob’s influence, much like the cognition in his accounts of religion and ritual, is by no means confined to the religious domain. Through his championing of an explanatory and naturalistic approach to religion, he has inspired “systematicity, generality, and testability” in accounts spanning human behaviour and culture across a wide range. 
 

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Dimitris Xygalatas | Anthropology, University of Connecticut
"Ritual, Embodiment, and Emotional Contagion" 

While the Cognitive Science of Religion has brought the mind to the forefront of analysis, it has had little to say about the body. As a result, the mechanisms underlying much-discussed and well-documented effects often remain elusive. In this paper, I will discuss ritual’s ability to facilitate the alignment of people’s bodies, actions, and emotions by presenting findings from an interdisciplinary research program that combines laboratory and field methods and discussing the implications of such findings for ritual’s role in promoting social coordination and group cohesion.

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