Kaleidoscience: Conversations on Cognitive Science

Tracy Sánchez Pacheco is researching social facilitation in spatial navigation as a PhD student at the institute of Cognitive Science.

Not only Tracy’s research area is super interesting, also her methods are: She is using Virtual Reality to put her participants into an environment of which she and her colleagues can control almost all aspects.

Mentioned/recommended papers:

Dalton, R. C., Hölscher, C., & Montello, D. R. (2019). Wayfinding as a social activity. Frontiers in psychology, 10, 142. [Topic: the general relevance of social stimuli in spatial navigation]

Kuehn, E., Chen, X., Geise, P., Oltmer, J., & Wolbers, T. (2018). Social targets improve body-based and environment-based strategies during spatial navigation. Experimental Brain Research, 236, 755-764. [Topic: specific social facilitation]

Hao, Q. Y., Jiang, R., Hu, M. B., Jia, B., & Wu, Q. S. (2011). Pedestrian flow dynamics in a lattice gas model coupled with an evolutionary game. Physical Review E, 84(3), 036107. [Topic: real-world behavior of people on the streets]

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

The field of artificial intelligence has changed and grown a lot in the last 20 years. Prof. Kai-Uwe Kühnberger witnessed this change first hand – and was part of it.

After studying Mathematics, Philosophy and Linguistics, and doing a PhD in Computational Linguistics, he then worked internationally as a researcher. Since 2009 he is the professor for Artificial Intelligence at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück.

Mentioned paper:

Vaswani, A., Shazeer, N., Parmar, N., Uszkoreit, J., Jones, L., Gomez, A. N., … & Polosukhin, I. (2017). Attention is all you need. Advances in neural information processing systems, 30.

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Piper has an interdisciplinary background in Psychology, Neuroscience and Machine Learning and is applying her knowledge in two amazing projects: For one, she is developing a wearable grasping assistant tool for the blind and visually impaired, and she is aiming to understand neural mechanisms to implement them in neuromorphic networks.

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Every sentence that we speak can conceal a myriad of meanings. Dr. Asya Achimova is exploring linguistic nuance: While some researchers assume ambiguity to be hindering in communication, Asya Achimova explores how we resolve and intentionally use ambiguous language.

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Sebastian Musslick studied Psychology and Neuroscience, did his PhD at Princeton and is now an Assistant Professor for Computational Neuroscience at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück.

Like many of our guests, he is very passionate about his research and is fascinated by the interdisciplinary work between Neuroscientists and Computer Scientists.

Recommended paper:

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

In many ways, Dr. Dr. Gregor Hörzer incorporates the “CogSci experience” – he studied telematics and by coincidence started visiting philosophy lectures. He ended up doing a PhD in both, studied philosophy of mind and worked as a computational neuroscientist. He is now the dean of studies and study coordinator at the Institute of Cognitive Science in Osnabrück.

Recommended books:

Goff, P. (2019): Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness. Rider/Penguin.

Goff, P. (2023): Why? The Purpose of the Universe. Oxford University Press.

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Jolinde is a PhD candidate in the Comparative Biocognition group at the IKW Osnabrück. She is comparing bonobo and dolphin behavior, with a special focus on turn-taking in mother-child interactions – this may sound familiar, do you remember our episode with Bas van Boekholt on chimpanzee communication? If not, make sure to listen to it!

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

For our first special episode that we recorded at the Cognitive Science Space Day, we talked to Prof. Dr. Peter König. He is a lecturer for Neurobiopsychology and Elisa and Sophie talked with him about his journey from Physics to Medicine to Neuroscience research. Besides his appreciation for the group of students at Osnabrück University, Prof. König also offers a quick ride through the very basics of neuroscience and how it can be applied to patients.

Listen to this episode if you want to learn more about the human brain, application-oriented research and the love to constant learning.

References:

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Why do we have to talk about ethics when we’re talking about AI?

And can we really trust the output ChatGPT or other AI functions provide us?

And what’s the thing with Instagram filters – is there a bias into how they change the look of people?

Those questions and many more will find answers in our next episode. We’re talking to Nora Freya Lindemann, a current PhD student. She is working in a project on AI and ethical questions connected to it, and is currently investigating decision making in chatbots and which impact those can have on the society.

References:

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge

Climate change and climate protection is a topic much discussed from different aspects. And it’s something that already affects us today and will become even more pressing in future.

In this episode, we go brain-to-brain with Charlotte Lange. She loves nature and wants to protect it. For this, she uses a tool that is also often discussed, but mostly in different contexts. She’s doing research and working on projects that connect climate models with deep neural networks, a form of AI, and wants to use the tools offered by technology to play her role in preserving nature.

References:

David Rolnick, Priya L. Donti, Lynn H. Kaack, Kelly Kochanski, Alexandre Lacoste, Kris Sankaran, Andrew Slavin Ross, Nikola Milojevic-Dupont, Natasha Jaques, Anna Waldman-Brown, Alexandra Luccioni, Tegan Maharaj, Evan D. Sherwin, S. Karthik Mukkavilli, Konrad P. Kording, Carla Gomes, Andrew Y. Ng, Demis Hassabis, John C. Platt, Felix Creutzig, Jennifer Chayes, & Yoshua Bengio. (2019). Tackling Climate Change with Machine Learning.

Salva Rühling Cachay, Venkatesh Ramesh, Jason N. S. Cole, Howard Barker, & David Rolnick. (2021). ClimART: A Benchmark Dataset for Emulating Atmospheric Radiative Transfer in Weather and Climate Models.

Kaltenborn, J., Lange, C. E. E., Ramesh, V., Brouillard, P., Gurwicz, Y., Nagda, C., … & Rolnick, D. (2023, November). ClimateSet: A Large-Scale Climate Model Dataset for Machine Learning. In Thirty-seventh Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems Datasets and Benchmarks Track.

Credits:

Produced by: Sophie Kühne and Alina Ohnesorge