The music and language CogSci Incubator’s second meeting will be Tuesday April 10th 3-4 pm in ILC N458. The reading is the following (by UMass Linguistics undergrad alum Jonah Katz). The abstract is appended below.

Jonah Katz (2017). Harmonic syntax of the 12-bar blues: a corpus study. Music Perception, 35(2), 165-192. Preprint (LingBuzz). Supplementary materials: data, statistical models, tree graphs, description of modeling.

Junha Chang (PBS) will be giving the cognitive brown bag Wednesday April 4 in Tobin 521B, 12:00-1:20).  Title and abstract follow.

Search guidance is sometimes, but not always, adjusted by experience with search discriminability

These experiments show that previous experience with certain types of visual search can influence current search guidance, and explore factors that determine whether these effects of experience arise or not. In a dual-target search task, two subject groups either experienced difficult color discriminability in half of the trials (i.e., hard-discrimination group) or experienced easy discriminability in all trials (i.e., easy-discrimination group). In both experiments, subjects were required to respond whether either of two targets was present or not among distractors. In Experiment 1, the same two colors served as possible target colors for the entire experiment. Fixation rate was high for distractors with colors similar to a target color, and gradually decreased for colors less and less similar to the target color. There was no significant difference between two groups in both eye movement and behavioral results. In Experiment 2, the colors of the two targets were varied from trial to trial in order to increase working memory demand. The hard-discrimination group fixated more distractors with target-dissimilar colors than the easy-discrimination group, suggesting the hard-discrimination group used color information to guide search less than the easy-discrimination group. The results demonstrate that experience of difficult color discriminability discourages observers from guiding attention by color and encourage them to use shape information, but only when working memory load is demanding.

who:  Maja Rudolph – Columbia
when: 11:45 A.M. 1:15 P.M., Thursday, March 29th
where: Computer Science Building Rm 150
food: Athena’s pizza

“Exponential Family Embeddings”

Abstract:  Word embeddings are a powerful approach for capturing semantic similarity among terms in a vocabulary. Exponential family embeddings extend the idea of word embeddings to other types of high-dimensional data such as count data from a recommendation system or real-valued data from neural recordings. Exponential family embeddings have three ingredients; embeddings as latent variables, a predefined conditioning set for each observation called the context, and a conditional likelihood from the exponential family. The embeddings are inferred with a scalable algorithm based on stochastic gradient descent. In this talk, I discuss three highlights of the exponential family embeddings model class: (A) The approximations used for existing methods such as word2vec can be understood as a biased stochastic gradients procedure on a specific type of exponential family embedding model. (B) By choosing different likelihoods from the exponential family we can generalize the task of learning distributed representations to different application domains. (C) Finally, the probabilistic modeling perspective allows us to incorporate structure and domain knowledge in the latent space. With dynamic embeddings, we can study how word usage changes over time and structured embeddings allow us to learn embeddings that vary across related groups of data. Key to the success of our method is that the groups share statistical information and we develop three sharing strategies: dynamic modeling, hierarchical modeling, and amortization.

Robert Siegler (Carnegie Mellon University http://www.psy.cmu.edu/~siegler/), will speak on “Numerical Development” from 1-2pm in ILC room N400. The talk is sponsored by the Developmental Science Initiative. An abstract follows.

Abstract: In this talk, I attempt to integrate two crucial aspects of numerical development: learning the magnitudes of individual numbers and learning arithmetic. Numerical magnitude development involves gaining increasingly precise knowledge of increasing ranges and types of numbers: from nonsymbolic to small symbolic numbers, from smaller to larger whole numbers, and from whole to rational numbers. One reason why this development is important is that precision of numerical magnitude knowledge is correlated with, predictive of, and causally related to both whole and rational number arithmetic. Rational number arithmetic, however, also poses challenges beyond understanding the magnitudes of the individual numbers. Some of these challenges are inherent; they are present for all learners. Other challenges are culturally contingent; they vary from country to country and classroom to classroom. Our findings indicate that a largely ignored culturally contingent variable, distributions of problems in mathematics textbooks, substantially influences learning of rational number arithmetic. Generating theories and data that help children surmount the challenges of rational number arithmetic is an important goal for numerical development research.

Colin Phillips (University of Maryland, https://www.colinphillips.net) is presenting “Speaking, understanding, and grammar” in the Department of Linguistics on Friday, March 30th, at 3:30PM, in the  Integrative Learning Center in room N400. The abstract is below.

Abstract: We speak and understand the same language, but it’s generally assumed that language production and comprehension are subserved by separate cognitive systems. So they must presumably draw on a third, task-neutral cognitive system (“grammar”). For this reason, comprehension-production differences are a thorn in the side of anybody who might want to collapse grammar and language processing mechanisms (i.e., me!). In this talk I will explore two linguistic domains from the perspective of comprehension and production. In the case of syntactic categories, I will show that the same underlying mechanisms can have rather different surface effects in comprehension and production. In the case of argument role information, I will show an apparent conflict between comprehension and production. In production, argument role information tightly governs the time course of speech planning. But in comprehension, initial prediction mechanisms seem to be blind to argument role information. I argue that both the similarities and contrasts can be captured under a view in which the same cognitive architecture is accessed based on different information, i.e., sounds for comprehension, messages for production. I will discuss the relation between this and other ways of thinking about comprehension-production relations, drawing on a combination of behavioral and electrophysiological evidence.

The Music and Language CogSci Incubator (https://websites.umass.edu/cogsci/2018/03/10/music-and-language-cogsci-incubator-with-acevedo-and-temperley/) will begin on Tues. April 3rd at 2:30 in ILC N458 with a discussion of David Temperley’s The Musical Language of Rock. Participants are encouraged to bring questions and discussion points that don’t assume everyone has read the book (in other words, please come even if you haven’t even cracked its spine). The book turns out to assume a fair bit of music theory, so clarification questions are very much appropriate (and we might pick something else to discuss the next week). If you are having trouble getting the book on time (OUP ships quickly), please contact Joe Pater.

The fourth annual UMass CogSci Workshop will be held in conjunction with Sue Carey’s visit to the campus on April 20th (https://websites.umass.edu/cogsci/2018/01/30/sue-carey-friday-april-20th-at-330/). The workshop will consist of a poster session from 2:15-3:15; please submit your poster info here: https://goo.gl/forms/mt9v6NYU30zywGNe2. As always, previously presented work is allowed, even encouraged (don’t print a new poster if you can use one you already have!).