CEU Department of Cognitive Science

❓ How do children learn so much about the world and so efficiently?

🧒 The iSearch Research Group investigates how children actively search for information in their physical and social environments to obtain clues for testing and revising their hypotheses over time.

📱 As part of this, iSearch have developed several tablet games aimed at comprehensively assessing children's active learning performance from a developmental perspective - and are more than happy for you try them out!

Visit their station at CEU during the 𝗟𝗼𝗻𝗴 𝗡𝗶𝗴𝗵𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗥𝗲𝘀𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗰𝗵 (Die Lange Nacht der Forschung) on May 24!

More station details ➡️ https://langenachtderforschung.at/station/4931
More CEU Long Night of Research info ➡️ https://tinyurl.com/ywpx4xf3

Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum Workshop Wednesday, May 22, 2024, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Speaker Nikola Milićević, Pennsylvania State University The Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum is a series of informal monthly meetings of Budapest-based computational neuroscientists and computational cognitive scientists with the aim o...

The Cognitive Development Center at Central European University (CEU) invites applications for a Part-time Research Assistant position. Location: Budapest
https://www.ceu.edu/job/part-time-research-assistant

The Cognitive Development Center at Central European University (CEU) invites applications for a Full-time Research Assistant position. Location: Budapest

Research Assistant | Central European University The Cognitive Development Center at Central European University (CEU) invites applications for a Research Assistant position.

Warm congratulations to Laura Schlingloff-Nemecz who successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Best behaviors:
Young children’s understanding of helping actions, its preconditions and consequences” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with Professor Lindsey Powell (UCSD) and Professor Patricia Kanngiesser (University of Plymouth) as external examiners, Gergely Csibra (CEU) and Christophe Heintz (CEU) as Supervisors and József Fiser (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Wonderful job, so proud of you, Laura!

Warm congratulations to Dominik Garber who successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “ABSTRACTION, CONSOLIDATION, AND EXPLICITNESS IN SPATIO-TEMPORAL VISUAL STATISTICAL LEARNING” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with Professor Nicolas Turk-Browne (Yale University) and Professor Takeo Watanabe (Brown University) as external examiners, József Fiser (CEU) and Máté Lengyel (CEU) as Supervisors and Eva Wittenberg (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Wonderful job, so proud of you, Dominik!

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science/CDC cordially invites you to the following talk by:
Liuba Papeo (CNRS Lyon)
Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2024
Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET
Venue: D001 (QS Vienna) and Zoom:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/92588721947?pwd=RWF5ck9oaWV2Z3pTdmtsdDdMZVdZdz09
Meeting ID: 925 8872 1947
Passcode: 860218

Chair: Agnes Kovacs Melinda

Title: Seeing social beings
Abstract: “Social cognition” refers to a set of high-level processes for understanding and behaving in the social world, which take place in the “social brain” across the association cortex in the temporoparietal cortex, medial prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. However, a growing body of evidence, using the visual system as a model, points to a closer and more integrated relationship between social cognition and basic perceptual mechanisms than previously appreciated. I will present behavioral and neuroimaging research showing that a principle for the organization of information in visual perception (and in visual cortex) is the social-nonsocial distinction, which reveals itself early in the behavior of humans –as well as other socially gregarious species such as monkeys and chicks.

We are looking forward to seeing you here!
https://events.ceu.edu/2024-04-24/departmental-colloquium-liuba-papeo-cnrs-lyon

Departmental Colloquium - Liuba Papeo, CNRS Lyon Lecture Wednesday, April 24, 2024, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Speaker Liuba Papeo The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Language Comprehension Lab invite you to the following talk by: Liuba Papeo, CNRS Lyon, France Date: Wednesday, April 24, 2024 Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET Venue: D001 (QS Vienna...

CCC Colloquium - Interpretable representations of neural dynamics using geometric deep learning Colloquium Wednesday, March 20, 2024, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Speaker Ádám Gosztolai The Center for Cognitive Computation (CCC) invites you to the lecture of Ádám Gosztolai (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne) Interpretable representations of neural dynamics using geometric deep learning ht...

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk by
Jean-Remy Hochmann (ISC Marc Jeannerod)
Title:
Incomplete Language of Thought in infancy
Abstract:
The view that infants possess a full-fledged propositional Language of Thought (LoT) is appealing, providing a unifying account for infants’ precocious reasoning skills in several domains. In this talk, I'll present evidence that preverbal infants possess structured mental representations, with abstract generalizable content. However, I'll argue that careful appraisal of empirical evidence suggests that infants lack a crucial component of a propositional LoT: discrete representations of abstract relations.

Date: Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET

Venue: D002* (QS Vienna) and Zoom (meeting ID: 969 2496 5784, passcode: 471712)

Chair: Erno Teglas
We are looking forward to seeing you here!
https://events.ceu.edu/2024-03-13/departmental-colloquium-incomplete-language-thought-infancy

Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum Workshop Wednesday, March 13, 2024, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Speaker Nikola Milićević, Pennsylvania State University The Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum is a series of informal monthly meetings of Budapest-based computational neuroscientists and computational cognitive scientists with the aim...

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science invites you to the following talk by

Manuel Bohn (Max Plank Institute/Leuphana University Lüneburg)

Grounding socio-communicative development in everyday experience: an individual differences perspective

Social cognition and communication are defining aspects of what it means to be human. In this talk, I want to present our research program that studies the driving forces behind socio-communicative development. Our goal is to understand how everyday social interactions influence development. To get there, we will have to overcome numerous theoretical and methodological hurdles. I will present the steps we have taken in recent years towards this goal, which include computational models of the cognitive processes underlying aspects of socio-communicative development, tasks to measure cognitive abilities on an individual level, methods to capture and quantify everyday experiences and international collaborations to probe the generalisability of findings. Much of our work is still in the early phases, so I am very much looking forward to feedback.

Date: Wednesday, March 6, 2024
Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET
Venue: D002* (QS Vienna) and Zoom (meeting ID: 969 2496 5784, passcode: 471712)
Chair: Gergely Csibra

We are looking forward to seeing you here!
https://events.ceu.edu/2024-03-06/departmental-colloquium-grounding-socio-communicative-development-everyday-experience

The application deadline for the CEU Summer University courses has been extended! Please see below the calls about the below relevant courses:

The Human Mind and The Open Society
Extended deadline: March 6

The Ethics of Attention
(until all places are filled).

For more details and the application form see:

Summer Courses at Central European University Intensive interactive summer courses at CEU Budapest in the social sciences and humanities. Gain applied skills, build interdisciplinary and cross-sectoral networks! Find a course and apply today!

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science and the Language Comprehension Lab invites you to the following talk:

Hugh Rabagliati (The University of Edinburgh)

Title: Biased language and the double-edged sword of efficient communication

Abstract: Natural language contains and communicates a variety of social biases, a fact that increasingly impacts human activity. Biases in language are typically assumed to reflect biases and prejudices in how we think about social groups, but here I’ll discuss evidence for an additional psychological cause, in which linguistic biases arise as a consequence of the automatised mechanisms that we use to communicate efficiently. Psycholinguistic and developmental experiences document that, when describing events, speakers show a “like me” bias to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups, a fact that holds across demographic categories, linguistic backgrounds, and age. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is not caused by attitudes or social goals, but instead by greater efficiency in retrieving words that refer to in-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language, and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can also have fundamental social implications.

Date: Wednesday, February 21, 2024
Venue: QS D-001 Tiered* (Vienna)
Time: Feb 21, 2024 04:00 PM Budapest

Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/93056812576?pwd=eFBNQUt3b2lxdnFQYU9RRmpoVlpRQT09
Meeting ID: 930 5681 2576
Passcode: 052633

Chair: Eva Wittenberg

https://events.ceu.edu/2024-02-21/departmental-colloquium-biased-language-and-double-edged-sword-efficient-communication

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by:
Pascal Mamassian, CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France
Date: Wednesday, February 14, 2024
Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET
Venue: D001 (QS Vienna) and Zoom: https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/99828555100?pwd=S2Y4VnRMTEFHMitWeWk4bnB0SGdXQT09
Meeting ID: 998 2855 5100
Passcode: 393080

Chair: Jozsef Fiser
Title: Measurements of perceived time of visual events
Abstract: Visual perception is not instantaneous. It takes a few milliseconds for light to be transduced in photoreceptors and tens of milliseconds more for neuronal spikes to occur at successive levels of the visual hierarchy. These delays necessarily impact our ability to perceive time. I will present examples of human time perception from two classes of tasks, duration estimation and perceived time of an event. In duration estimation, we have shown that observers are able to estimate the duration of an interval even when the onset of that interval is not explicitly provided. In perceived time, we have shown that the perceived time of an event is influenced by other events in their temporal proximity, and that this perceived time varies across the visual field. A better understanding of our sensitivity to and biases in the perception of time is important to fully appreciate how well we understand our sensory environment.
https://events.ceu.edu/2024-02-14/departmental-colloquium-pascal-mamassian-measurements-perceived-time-visual-events

Departmental Colloquium - Pascal Mamassian: Measurements of perceived time of visual events Lecture Wednesday, February 14, 2024, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Speaker Pascal Mamassian Measurements of perceived time of visual events Pascal Mamassian CNRS & Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France Visual perception is not instantaneous. It takes a few milliseconds for light to be transduced in photor...

The CEU Department of Cognitive Science cordially invites you to the following talk by:

Nikhil Chaudhary, Evolutionary Anthropologist based at the University of Cambridge

Date: Thursday, February 8, 2024 (mind the unusual day please)
Time: 4 pm (to 5:30 pm) CET
Venue: D318 (QS Vienna) and Zoom:
https://ceu-edu.zoom.us/j/94486731045?pwd=VCt1WGZnd1F0MkZleGYvaDRpWEg3Zz09
Meeting ID: 944 8673 1045
Passcode: 328579

Chair: Christophe Heintz and Angarika Deb

Title: Hunter-Gatherer Social Organisation and Behaviour: Implications for Mental Health

Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for the vast majority of our species’ history. Therefore, research with contemporary hunter-gatherer societies can offer insight into the evolution of our psychology and physiology. Drawing on my fieldwork with BaYaka hunter-gatherers from Congo, I will discuss the selection pressures that have shaped human social cognition and behaviour. I will focus on the communal living arrangements, egalitarian social organisation, and extensive cooperation, particularly in the domain of childrearing, which are normative across contemporary hunter-gatherer populations. I will also discuss how deviations from these features of sociality, which are commonplace in high-income industrialised societies, may increase our vulnerability to mental health disorders due to evolutionary mismatch—when an organism faces conditions that differ from those that some trait of the organism is adapted to, resulting in pathology or maladaptation.

https://events.ceu.edu/2024-02-08/departmental-colloquium-nikhil-chaudhary-hunter-gatherer-social-organisation-and

Departmental Colloquium - Nikhil Chaudhary: Hunter-Gatherer Social Organisation and Behaviour: Implications for Mental Health Lecture Thursday, February 8, 2024, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm Speaker Nikhil Chaudhary Hunter-Gatherer Social Organisation and Behaviour: Implications for Mental Health. Humans lived as hunter-gatherers for the vast majority of our species’ history. Therefore, research with contemporary hunter-gatherer ...

Submissions are open for the XV. Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science devoted to Memory, space, and language. The conference will take place between 23 and 26 May 2024 in Dubrovnik, Croatia.

DUCOG 2024 brings together researchers striving to understand what shared neural and cognitive mechanisms allow humans and non-human animals to represent and process memory, space, and language and how these mechanisms change across the lifespan. Our goal is to uncover synergies and opposing views of approaches from different levels of analysis, from cellular through systems level neuroscience to cognitive- and neuropsychology, in order to facilitate cross-talk between currently independent research fields to inspire novel research.

Invited speakers will include:

Helen Barron – University of Oxford, UK
Melissa C. Duff - Vanderbilt University, USA
Paul Frankland – University of Toronto, Canada
Monika Schönauer - University of Freiburg, Germany
Jelena Sučević - University of Oxford, UK

We invite poster submissions from all areas of cognitive science. Both theoretical and empirical posters are welcome.

You may submit your poster abstract here: https://ducog.cecog.eu/submit

The deadline for abstract submission is 28 February 2024.
Authors will be notified of acceptance of their abstracts by 15 March 2024.

For more information, please visit https://ducog.cecog.eu/
or email us at [email protected].

On behalf of the organisers,
Attila Keresztes,
Markus Werkle-Bergner
- Conference chairs

DUCOG — Conference 2024 Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science

Representation Learning Reading Group Workshop Thursday, January 25, 2024, 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm The reading group discusses (mostly recent) papers about theoretical machine learning and algorithms that aim to learn structured, compressed and/or interpretable latent representations of observations in a principled way, often with implicati...

Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum Workshop Wednesday, January 31, 2024, 5:00 pm – 6:30 pm Speaker Zoltán Somogyvári, Wigner Research Centre for Physics The Budapest Computational Neuroscience Forum is a series of informal monthly meetings of Budapest-based computational neuroscientists and computational cognitive scientists with...

We are hiring!!! 🤓
The Language Comprehension Lab of the Department of Cognitive Science has announced 2 RA and 1 Postdoc positions to Vienna!
If interested, please check it here:
https://www.ceu.edu/careers?position=All&status=All&location=2&referral_value=All
We are looking forward receiving your applications!

Careers | Central European University Copyright © Central European UniversityPostal Address Austria: Central European University Private University | Quellenstraße 51 | A-1100 Wien, Austria | Vienna Commercial Court | FN 502313 x Postal Address Hungary: Közép-európai Egyetem | Nádor u. 9. | 1051 Budapest, Hungary Imprint/Impressum

Warm congratulations to Barbu Revencu who successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “Not a Pipe - STAND-FOR Relations in Human Cognition” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with Professor Elizabeth Spelke (Harvard, Department of Psychology) and Hannes Rakoczy (Georg-Elias-Müller-Institut für Psychologie) as external examiners, Gergely Csibra (CEU) and Dan Sperber (CEU) as Supervisors and Natalie Sebanz (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Wonderful job, so proud of you, Barbu!

Warm congratulations to Ieva Lukosiunaite who successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “Action Observation and Imagery in Visuospatial Perspective Taking” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with Klaus Kessler (School of Psychology from University College Dublin) and Marcello Costantini (University G. d'Annunzio, Chieti-Pescara) as external examiners, Natalie Sebanz (CEU) and Agnes Melinda Kovacs (CEU) as Supervisors, and Eva Wittenberg (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Great job! So proud of you, Ieva!

CEU OPEN DAY, November 24, 2023

Full program available below:
https://www.ceu.edu/ceu-open-day?fbclid=IwAR26v0O2EMGgkCbj2HmILG5wWk4ICwFhGNfCxxIf05XpJJnUh-yOQXVVKDg

Central European University Choosing the right university can be challenging. We're inviting you, your family and your friends to visit CEU to help make that choice a little easier.

Warm congratulations to Vjeran Keric who successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “PERCEPTION AND DISTRIBUTION OF EFFORT IN JOINT ACTION” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with Ines Jentzsch, a cognitive neuroscientist from the School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St Andrews and Tim Welsh, a professor of motor planning and control, from the Faculty of Kinesiology & Physical Education, University of Toronto as external examiners, Natalie Sebanz (CEU) and Gunther Knoblich (CEU) as Supervisors, and Agnes Melinda Kovacs (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Great job! So proud of you, Vjeran!

Dear Colleagues,

The submission system for the 14th annual BCCCD meeting in Budapest, Hungary (January 4-6, 2024) is now open for symposia, talks, and posters. Submissions are open until September 3, 2023. Please note that talk and poster abstracts should be submitted here, while unifying statements for symposia should be submitted via this form. More information on submission formats can be found below. We welcome submissions from all fields of cognitive development.

While CEU has relocated much of its operations to Vienna, we would like to reassure all prospective participants that we are committed to maintaining the tradition of the Budapest campus of CEU as the site of BCCCD meetings in 2024 and for the foreseeable future.

We hope to see you there!

Jonathan F. Kominsky & Magdalena Roszkowski
BCCCD24 Chairs

BCCCD2024 - OpenConf Abstract Submission, Peer Review, and Event Management System Welcome to the submission system for individual talks, posters, and symposia for BCCCD 2024! To submit an abstract please click the "Make submission" link under "Authors" below.

Afterdefense moments with dr. Marcell Szekely (with John Michael, Gunther Knoblich and Zselyke Borbala Szekely.

Warm congratulations to Marcell Székely who successfully defended his PhD dissertation titled “Functional and Proximal Mechanisms of Effort Matching in Joint Action” today at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Budapest with Elizabeth Pacherie, Directrice de Recherche CNRS/Jean Nicod and Nicolas Baumard, Ecole Normal Superieure Paris as external examiners, Gunther Knoblich (CEU) and John Andrew Michael (University of Milan) as Supervisors, and Christophe Heintz (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Great job! So proud of you, Marcell!

Warm congratulations to Dora Anna Fogd who successfully defended her PhD dissertation titled “The representational flexibility of spontaneous theory of mind in human adults” today late morning at the CEU Department of Cognitive Science in Vienna with David Buttelmann, Lecturer from the University of Bern and Evan Edward Westra, Assistant Professor from Purdue University as external examiners, Agnes Melinda Kovacs (CEU), Natalie Sebanz (CEU) and Erno Teglas (CEU) as Supervisors, and Eva Wittenberg (CEU) as Head of the Dissertation Committee.
Great job! So proud of you, Dora!