MTS is the department’s Mind, Technology, and Society speaker series. It is hosted by a different faculty member each semester. Founded by a generous gift from Professors Robert Glushko and Pamela Samuelson, MTS brings researchers and industry professionals from across the globe to present a variety of interdisciplinary work in cognitive science. See our UCMerced CogSci youtube channel for videos of past MTS talks!
CIS graduate students, faculty, and staff, and all who are interested are invited! Members of other departments at UC Merced as well as the general public are encouraged to attend. (Note: current CIS Ph.D. students are required to attend MTS each semester in residence, to fulfill their COGS 250 course requirement).
Dr. Thompson's talk "Experimental evolution of structured norms for joint action" will be 3-4:30pm in COB 116.
Description: Participants in a large study of joint planning developed structured, algorithmic solutions to a relatively difficult sequential joint-action problem. Three of the best solutions were identified and characterized structurally via a novel program synthesis method, then transmitted to new participant dyads in twelve independent populations as norms for fair and effective joint action. Norms at fixation (both parties in dyads inherit the same algorithmic concept) were maintained during transmission despite their complexity. What do you think happened to the same norms when they were transmitted in parallel (participants in a dyad inherited misaligned algorithmic concepts)? Come to the talk to find out!
Bio: I am a cognitive scientist interested in understanding what makes human intelligence so open-ended and creative. With my students and collaborators I study the social foundations of higher cognitive abilities such as language, problem-solving, reasoning, decision-making, and creative thinking.
The goal of our research is to develop more complete models of the computational processes that arise in social networks as a consequence of human interaction and the transmission of knowledge from person to person. We combine behavioral experiments, computational modeling, and machine learning to study how these processes influence ways of thinking and communicating in the lab and in society.
For more information or to sign up for email announcements, please contact the talk series organizer: cis-mts-lead@lists.ucmerced.edu.
