Student Section - Friday 1:00 to 1:50, CSB 003
(The student section will not meet September 23rd, its first meeting will be
September 30)
Lecture - Friday 2:20 - 3:50, CSB 003 (First meeting, September 23rd)
Instructor: Rick Grush (rick@mind.ucsd.edu)
Office Hours: TBA
Office Phone: 822-4440
Short Description:
Temporality is a fundamental feature of almost every aspect of cognition (broadly construed) worth investigating. To mention just three: successful sensorimotor behavior often requires extremely delicate temporal sensitivity (as well as the required spatial sensitivity which is a much more common topic of scientific investigation); natural languages have many surprisingly rich, and arguably mandatory, resources for coding the temporality of events, and the temporal relations between events; psychological phenomena such as the flash-lag effect, Libet's results, apparent motion, and many others, suggest that the temporality of events as we perceive them may be as much or more a matter of cognitive construction than passive reflection.
The goal of the seminar will be to explore the various ways that the representation of time is approached by a variety of disciplines concerned with behavior, cognition, perception, communication, and culture.
Schedule
September 23 Rick Grush Introduction and overview
Abstract: In this introductory lecture, I will briefly cover a few topics to provide a bit of orientation, such as a brief caricature history of the central role that the psychophysics of temporal perception played in the history of experimental psychology; a number of 'temporal illusions'; and a little on the development and meaning of the 'specious present' doctrine, made famous by William James in the late 1800s.
No readings
September 30 Rick Grush (UCSD Philosophy): Is time its own representation in perceptual processing?
Abstract: I will discuss two claims about perceptual processing that are somewhat counter-intuitive, but for which there are good reasons to believe are true of human perceptual processing: first, that the content grasped in perceptual experince at any instant is not itself an instant, but a temporal interval; and second, that the specifics of what is grasped in this interval is not a passive reflection of perceived events, but an active interpretation. I will also discuss an information processing model that shows how these features can be realized.
Reading: Grush, Rick (2005). Internal models and the construction of time: generalizing from state estimation to trajectory estimation to address temporal features of perception, including temporal illusions. Journal of Neural Engineering 2(3):S209-S218. [pdf]
October 7 John Jacobson (UCSD Philosophy) Unbinding Time
Abstract TBA
Reading: Dennett, Daniel C. & Kinsbourne, Marcel (1992) Time and the Observer. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 15(2):183-247. [pdf]
October 14 Esra Özyürek (UCSD Anthropology): Public Memory and its Politics
Abstract: During the lecture I will talk about the way anthropologists and their relatives have been dealing with public memory.
Reading: Politics of the Past: Production and Erasure of Memory in Turkey, Chapter 6 - Public Memory as Political Battleground: Islamist Subversions of Republican Nostalgia [pdf]
October 21 Teenie Matlock (UC Merced Social and Cognitive Sciences): Time and motion in everyday language and thought
Abstract: Cognitive scientists have long been interested in how people understand time and other abstract domains. One claim is people's understanding of time is grounded in knowledge about the physical world. This talk presents experimental data on the ways that time is understood relative to thought about motion, including actual motion, fictive motion (Matlock, 2004; Talmy, 1996), and abstract motion (Langacker, 1987). The results demonstrate that thought about motion, even non-physical motion, influences temporal understanding, and more generally, that language use and understanding draws on conceptual embodied experience.
Reading: Matlock, T, Ramscar, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2005). The experiential link between spatial and temporal language. Cognitive Science, 29, 655-664. [pdf]
October 28 Leslie Carver (UCSD Psychology) Title TBA
Abstract TBA
Reading: L Carver, L. J. & Bauer, P. J. (2001). The dawning of a past: The emergence of long-term explicit memory in infancy. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 130, 726-745. [pdf 2.4MB]
November 4 Michael Gorman (UCSD Psychology) When do circadian molecules become a circadian clock?
Abstract: When the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) of mammals was first lesioned in the 1970's, the resultant loss of daily rhythmicity established this system as among the tightest structure-function relationships in neurobiology. An explosion of recent studies has characterized this structure at the cellular and molecular levels. This class will consider what it means to say that our brains contain a circadian "clock" and whether these modern studies have shed substantive light on the nature of biological "clocks."
Readings: Gorman and Elliott, Entrainment of 2 Subjective Nights by Daily Light:Dark:Light:Dark Cycles in 3 Rodent Species [pdf 250k]
Yamaguchi et al. 'Synchronization of Cellular Clocks in the Suprachiasmatic Nucleus' [pdf 2.6 MB]
November 11 Veterans' Day
November 18 Rafael Núñez (UCSD Cognitive Science) Could the future taste purple? The empirical study of spatial construals of time
Abstract: Humans from all over the world, speaking different languages, naturally express (and apparently, think about) time-related events in terms of spatial entities and properties. This phenomenon shows up in linguistic metaphorical expressions such as (a) "we are approaching the end of the quarter," and (b) "Thanksgiving is approaching." Research in cognitive linguistics and in processing of temporal metaphors has traditionally distinguished between Moving-Ego conceptual metaphors, as in (a), and Moving-Time ones, as in (b). Both of these conceptual metaphors involve time events in reference to an Ego, which specifies the present time “Now” where FUTURE IS IN FRONT OF EGO and PAST IS IN BACK OF EGO. In this talk I will argue that the picture is more complicated than that: (1) The specified bodily orientation is not universal, and (2) not all spatial construals of time have the Ego as reference point. In order to support (1), I will provide convergent empirical evidence (lexical-metaphorical-gestural) from my field study of the Aymara culture of the Andes, which shows that the Aymara people operate with an unusual PAST-IN-FRONT-OF-EGO and FUTURE-BEHIND-EGO mapping. And to support (2), I will describe a priming experiment conducted in my lab, which shows that there is a fundamental (perhaps more primitive) spatial metaphorical construal of time defined after Time events—-not Ego—-as reference points. Implications for “Embodiment” and bodily-grounded approaches to the understanding of the mind will be discussed.
Readings: Núñez and Sweetser (accepted) Looking ahead to the past: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the crosslinguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. To appear in Cognitive Science. [pdf]
Núñez, Motz, and Teuscher 'Time after time: The psychological reality of the Ego- and Time-Reference-Point distinction in metaphorical construals of time.' (Accepted for publication in Metaphor and Symbol) [pdf-346k]
December 2 Ron Langacker (UCSD Linguistics): Time from a Cognitive Linguistic Perspective
Abstract: A basic distinction is made in Cognitive Grammar between conceived time and processing time, i.e. time as an object of conception vs. time as the medium of conception. Each has varied manifestations in linguistic structure. How they relate to one another is crucial to the analysis of important semantic and grammatical phenomena.
Readings:
Dynamicity in grammar [pdf 336k]
The English present tense [pdf 328k]
Requirements for enrolled students
The student section of CogSci 200 will meet Fridays from 1:00 to 1:50 in CSB 003, beginning September 30th. We (myself, enrolled students, and in some cases that week's speaker) will discuss one or more papers by that week's speaker, in part as preparation for the lecture itself. The course is S/U grading only. The requirements for getting an S are
1. Read the week's readings before the student section
2. Attend the student sections and the talks.
A short five question multiple choice quiz at the beginning of the student section will be used to assess item 1. It will be designed so that anyone who has read the material carefully should be able to answer most or all of the questions with little difficulty. The quiz will be handed out at 1:00 pm Pacific Standard Time, and collected at 1:05 pm Pacific Standard Time, so don't be late.
In order to get an S, students can get a score of 0 or 1 on at most one quiz (which entails that at most one class can be missed), and must end up with an average of at least 3/5 on all quizzes.