The Computational Machinery of Cognition (CMC) lab at TU Dresden has an open PhD position. More information about this position can be found at the provided links.

The Max Planck School of Cognition offers an international four-year doctoral program (Cognition Track and Clinician Scientist Track) starting with a one-year orientation period followed by three years of research for the doctorate. Students can enter with a Bachelor’s (fast-track) or a Master’s degree.

The Max Planck School of Cognition offers an international four-year doctoral program (Cognition Track and Clinician Scientist Track) starting with a one-year orientation period followed by three years of research for the doctorate. Students can enter with a Bachelor’s (fast-track) or a Master’s degree.

Non-human great apes inform one another in ways that can seem very humanlike. Especially in the gestural domain, their behavior exhibits many similarities with human communication, meeting widely used empirical criteria for intentionality. At the same time, there remain some manifest differences. How to account for these similarities and differences in a unified way remains a major challenge. This presentation will summarise the arguments developed in a recent paper with Christophe Heintz. We make a key distinction between the expression of intentions (Ladyginian) and the expression of specifically informative intentions (Gricean), and we situate this distinction within a ‘special case of’ framework for classifying different modes of attention manipulation. The paper also argues that the attested tendencies of great ape interaction—for instance, to be dyadic rather than triadic, to be about the here-and-now rather than ‘displaced’—are products of its Ladyginian but not Gricean character. I will reinterpret video footage of great ape gesture as Ladyginian but not Gricean, and distinguish several varieties of meaning that are continuous with one another. We conclude that the evolutionary origins of linguistic meaning lie in gradual changes in not communication systems as such, but rather in social cognition, and specifically in what modes of attention manipulation are enabled by a species’ cognitive phenotype: first Ladyginian and in turn Gricean. The second of these shifts rendered humans, and only humans, ‘language ready’.

Why should psychologists be interested in robots? This talk aims to illustrate how social robots – machines with human-like features and behaviors – can offer interesting insights into the human mind. I will first provide a brief overview of how robots have been used in psychology and cognitive science research focusing on two approaches - Developmental Robotics and Human-Robot Interaction (HRI). We will then delve into recent works in HRI, including my own, in greater detail. We will also address the limitations of research thus far, such as the lack of proper controlled experiments, and discuss how the scientific community should evaluate the use of technology in educational and other social settings.

Speech may be characterized as conveying both segmental information (i.e., about vowels and consonants) as well as suprasegmental information - cued through pitch, intensity, and duration - also known as the prosody of speech. In this contribution, I will argue that prosody shapes low-level speech perception, changing which speech sounds we hear. Perhaps the most notable example of how prosody guides word recognition is the phenomenon of lexical stress, whereby suprasegmental F0, intensity, and duration cues can distinguish otherwise segmentally identical words, such as "PLAto" vs. "plaTEAU" in Dutch. Work from our group showcases the vast variability in how different talkers produce stressed vs. unstressed syllables, while also unveiling the remarkable flexibility with which listeners can learn to handle this between-talker variability. It also emphasizes that lexical stress is a multimodal linguistic phenomenon, with the voice, lips, and even hands conveying stress in concert. In turn, human listeners actively weigh these multisensory cues to stress depending on the listening conditions at hand. Finally, lexical stress is presented as having a robust and lasting impact on low-level speech perception, even down to changing vowel perception. Thus, prosody - in all its multisensory forms - is a potent factor in speech perception, determining what speech sounds we hear.

Voluntary actions are actions that agents choose to make. Volition is the set of cognitive processes that implement such choice and initiation. These processes are often held essential to modern societies, because they form the cognitive underpinning for concepts of individual autonomy and individual responsibility. Nevertheless, psychology and neuroscience have struggled to define volition, and have also struggled to study it scientifically. Laboratory experiments on volition, such as those of Libet, have been criticised, often rather naively, as focussing exclusively on meaningless actions, and ignoring the factors that make voluntary action important in the wider world. In this talk, I will first review these criticisms, and then look at extending scientific approaches to volition in three directions that may enrich scientific understanding of volition. First, volition becomes particularly important when the range of possible actions is large and unconstrained - yet most experimental paradigms involve minimal response spaces. We have developed a novel paradigm for eliciting de novo actions through verbal fluency, and used this to estimate the elusive conscious experience of generativity. Second, volition can be viewed as a mechanism for flexibility, by promoting adaptation of behavioural biases. This view departs from the tradition of defining volition by contrasting internally-generated actions with externally-triggered actions, and instead links volition to model-based reinforcement learning. By using the context of competitive games to re-operationalise the classic Libet experiment, we identified a form of adaptive autonomy that allows agents to reduce biases in their action choices. Interestingly, this mechanism seems not to require explicit understanding and strategic use of action selection rules, in contrast to classical ideas about the relation between volition and conscious, rational thought. Third, I will consider volition teleologically, as a mechanism for achieving counterfactual goals through complex problem-solving. This perspective gives a key role in mediating between understanding and planning on the one hand, and instrumental action on the other hand. Taken together, these three cognitive phenomena of generativity, flexibility, and teleology may partly explain why volition is such an important cognitive function for organisation of human behaviour and human flourishing. I will end by discussing how this enriched view of volition can relate to individual autonomy and responsibility.

What do nonhuman primates know about each other and their social environment, how do they allocate their attention, and what are the functional consequences of social decisions in natural settings? Addressing these questions is crucial to hone in on the co-evolution of cognition, social behaviour and communication, and ultimately the evolution of intelligence in the primate order. I will present results from field experimental and observational studies on free-ranging baboons, which tap into the cognitive abilities of these animals. Baboons are particularly valuable in this context as different species reveal substantial variation in social organization and degree of despotism. Field experiments revealed considerable variation in the allocation of social attention: while the competitive chacma baboons were highly sensitive to deviations from the social order, the highly tolerant Guinea baboons revealed a confirmation bias. This bias may be a result of the high gregariousness of the species, which puts a premium on ignoring social noise. Variation in despotism clearly impacted the use of signals to regulate social interactions. For instance, male-male interactions in chacma baboons mostly comprised dominance displays, while Guinea baboon males evolved elaborate greeting rituals that serve to confirm group membership and test social bonds. Strikingly, the structure of signal repertoires does not differ substantially between different baboon species. In conclusion, the motivational disposition to engage in affiliation or aggressiveness appears to be more malleable during evolution than structural elements of the behavioral repertoire; this insight is crucial for understanding the dynamics of social evolution.