Prof. Marco Lenci (UNIBO Dept. of Mathematics) Prof. Luisa Lugli (UNIBO Dept. of Philosophy and Communication Studies)
Friday, June 1st - h. 14:15 - aula Tonelli (6th floor)
Through seminars and experiments the students will be exposed to state-of-the-art theories about how the brain perceives and elaborates mathematics (numbers, simple expressions, more complicated structures) and how arithmetical processing and spatial visual attention are strictly related.
This is an area of research in which mathematics, or rather mathematical cognition, is the subject of study. But mathematics can also be a powerful investigative tool, for example for the description of the movements of the eye and their relation with visual attention and other cognitive features. A lecture by an expert in the field will be on this topic.
Dipartimento di Informatica, Università degli Studi di Milano (Italy)
Abstract:
In this seminar we discuss how by considering eye movements, and in particular the resulting sequence of gaze shifts, a stochastic process, a wide variety of tools become available for analyses and modelling beyond conventional statistical methods.
We first give a brief, though critical, probabilistic tour of current computational models of eye movements and visual attention, and we lay down the basis for gaze shift pattern analysis. Then we discuss their links to the concepts of Markov Processes, the Wiener process and related random walks within the Gaussian framework of the Central Limit Theorem.
Eventually we will deliberately violate the fundamental assumptions of the Central Limit Theorem to elicit a larger perspective, rooted in statistical physics, for analysing and modelling eye movements in terms of anomalous, non-Gaussian, random walks and modern foraging theory.
Cognitive Sciences, University of Potsdam (Germany)
Abstract:
The concept of number has traditionally been considered as a prototypical instance of abstract(ed) knowledge. It denotes the size of any arbitrary set of objects, thus seemingly preventing systematic correlations with sensory or motor features. Yet, numerosity does co-vary with physical parameters in perception and action. Importantly, number symbols preserve this association. In this presentation, I describe how number processing obligatorily activates sensory and motor features: both sensory and motor processing are improved in left vs. right space following the presentation of small vs. large numbers. These links are bi-directional and suffice to identify numbers as embodied concepts. Moreover, these space-magnitude associations influence mental arithmetic and everyday quantitative reasoning (cf. Fischer & Shaki, 2014). Implications for research and theorizing will be discussed.
Reference:
Fischer, M. H. & Shaki, S. (2014). Spatial Associations in Numerical Cognition: From single digits to arithmetic. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 67(8), 1461-1483.
14:15: Lecture by M. Fisher + experiment
15:45: Coffee break
16:15: Lecture by G. Boccignone
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