09/11/07 First Year Student Orientation
#09/18/07 area faculty meeting
*09/25/07 Ed Vul, Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, MIT
Probability Distributions in the Head: Studying Representations with
Visual Selective Attention
*10/02/07 Fiery Cushman, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
The Origins of Moral Principles
10/09/07 Adam Green, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Mechanisms of Analogy: Categorization and Creativity
*10/16/07 Ed Awh, Department of Psychology, Oregon University
Capacity Limits and Taxonomy in Visual
Working Memory
10/23/07 Christian Luhmann, Department of Neurobiology, Yale University
Cognitive Simulation in Everyday Reasoning
*10/30/07 Mike Kahana, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Associative Retrieval Processes in Episodic
Memory
11/06/07 Julie Higgins, Department of Psychology, Yale University
The Thought Not Selected: Consequences of Selecting One of Several Active
Representations
*11/13/07 Joshua Greene, Department of Psychology, Harvard University
What Pushes Your Moral Buttons?
#11/20/07 Fall recess
11/27/07 Elise Christopher, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Repetition Effects and Implications for Attention: Evidence from Evoked-Rate
Potentials
#12/04/07 no talk scheduled
#01/15/08 area faculty meeting
01/22/08 Joshua New, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Adaptive Visual Cognition
*01/29/08 Sharon Thompson-Schill, Department of Psychology, University of Pennsylvania
Tuning the Language Organ: A New Perspective on the Role of Broca's Area in Language Processing
02/05/08 Yi He, Department of Psychology, Yale University
The influence of implicit associations on the perception of faces from
different races: an event-related potential study
02/12/08 Jessecae Marsh, Department of Psychology, Yale University
Causes, Categories, and Clinicians: Evidence of how background knowledge affects reasoning
02/19/08 Soojin Park, Department of Psychology, Yale University
The constructive nature of scene representations in the brain (oral dissertation presentation)
*02/26/08 Steve Palmer, Department of Psychology, University of California at Berkeley
Aesthetic Science: Understanding Preferences for Color and Spatial Composition
Abstract:
Despite the importance and ubiquity of aesthetic response, its perceptual basis in vision is almost entirely neglected. I will report results from three projects that investigate people's aesthetic responses to color and spatial composition. The spatial studies show strong, consistent preferences in simple images containing one familiar object or a configuration of objects for the subject to be positioned at or near the center of the frame (the "center bias") and to face into the frame (the "inward bias"). Related experiments on people's judgments of the "goodness of fit" for probe shapes (small circles or triangles) at various positions and orientations within a rectangular frame also exhibit the center and inward biases, with striking evidence for the role of symmetry and balance in spatial composition. People's preferences for color combinations are better predicted by their rated "harmony" than by preferences for the individual colors. Moreover, people tend to agree about the degree to which pairs of colors are harmonious, even though they may disagree about how much they like harmonious versus disharmonious colors. Contradicting many color theorists in the art world, color harmony appears to be primarily based on hue similarity ("analogous" colors) with no increase in perceived harmony for complimentary colors. The results demonstrate that aesthetic science is a new and exciting topic within cognitive science that can shed new light on the nature of our appreciation of the visual world.
03/04/08 Justin Junge, Department of Psychology, Yale University
title of talk forthcoming...
#03/11/08 Spring recess
#03/18/08 Spring recess
03/25/08 Tao Gao, Department of Psychology, Yale University
title of talk forthcoming...
04/01/08 Ben Rottman, Department of Psychology, Yale University
title of talk forthcoming...
04/08/08 Julie Golomb, Interdepartmental Neuroscience, Yale University
Effects of eye movements on visual
attention
04/15/08 Jeremy Shen, Department of Psychology, Yale University
title of talk forthcoming...
*04/22/08 Danny Oppenheimer Department of Psychology, Princeton University
The Secret Life of Fluency
