Cognitive Psychology seminars

Social world models extend prediction beyond physical dynamics to the intentions, beliefs and strategies of interacting agents. This talk examines how such representations can be learned and used in socially capable AI. Examples include multimodal models of behaviour, benchmarks for social reasoning and agents that adapt over extended interactions.

Human recall of meaningful narratives suggests that comprehension builds a hierarchical memory representation. This talk presents the recall evidence, a mathematical model reproducing the observed organization, and language-model-assisted semantic segmentation supporting a related hierarchical account of language.

Infants develop concepts and relations before acquiring substantial language, often with little explicit supervision. This talk presents computational models of that early learning and compares them with language-centred AI training. It asks whether the conceptual structures formed before language could provide useful ingredients for artificial learning systems.

Weaver ants coordinate their bodies and surrounding leaves to construct enclosed nests. Laboratory experiments show that a local zipping rule predicts construction in simple settings, yet colonies also solve puzzles where that rule fails. The talk examines how coupled ant–leaf dynamics can support information processing beyond individual cognition, providing an experimental model for the capabilities and limits of collective problem solving.

Could an artificial agent develop an operational first-person perspective through its own interaction history? This talk considers embodied systems that predict, receive feedback and integrate multiple modalities through global-workspace-like dynamics. Using the Conscious Turing Machine framework, it proposes that an agent-centred world model can acquire a temporally organized point of view. The discussion connects that structural proposal with enaction and neurophenomenology without establishing subjective experience in machines.

Understanding other agents may require more than describing their mechanisms. This talk contrasts Dennett's intentional stance with Humphrey's proposal that social life helps explain cognition itself. Observations of chimpanzee and meerkat groups, together with subtle perception and action in competitive games, provide concrete settings for examining those perspectives.