FriSem

Mona Rosenke, PhD student working with Professor Kalanit Grill-Spector, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

“Differential neural responses in high-level visual cortex explain categorization behavior”.

We categorize objects within our visual world remarkably fast. Prior research shows that neural responses within a single region are correlated with categorical judgments, which likely contributes to this efficient behavior. Despite these findings, it is presently unknown if not just one, but instead, several functional regions that are close to one another in cortex may work together when people are faced with the task of making categorical judgments. Here, we leveraged the fact that regions selective for faces and bodies are adjacent in human ventral temporal cortex to test if or how responses from both types of regions may contribute to categorical judgments. Specifically, we parametrically morphed face silhouettes into hands to relate behavioral and neural categorization to one another. We show that neural responses from both types of regions taken together predict behavioral categorization better than any one region by itself. These findings support a new idea in which the differential response of regions that are selective for different domains more accurately explains human categorical judgements than neural responses from either of those regions alone.

Kara Weisman, fifth-year PhD student working with Professors Ellen Markman & Carol Dweck, Department of Psychology, Stanford University

"Folk philosophy of mind: Changes in conceptual structure between 4-9y of age"

How do children come to make sense of the many emotions, sensations, and cognitive abilities that make up mental life? In a series of large-scale studies, we investigated 4- to 9-year-old children’s and adults’ attributions of a wide range of mental capacities to various target characters, including mammals, birds, insects, technologies, and toys. Our goal was to assess which attributions “go together”: e.g., if someone says that a robot can remember things, what else do they say a robot can do? This allowed us to reconstruct the latent structure underlying mental capacity judgments from the bottom up—a powerful and underutilized means of elucidating conceptual structure at different points in development. Taking into account intuitive ontologies of mental life could be critical for making sense of children’s developing understanding of the human, animal, and technological “beings” in the modern world.