How do infants treat information they come across?

I sit down with Velisar Manea to chat about how the infant mind develops, the types of biases evolution might have built in, and how they manage to be so adaptive.

We also chat a good bit of theory, particularly about whether we need to attribute mental states to others or whether statistical prediction is enough. We chat about the evolutionary usefulness of biological constraints, the caloric demands of cognition versus the energy demands of AI, and whether something like an LLM can ever actually reach cognition or just mimic it.

Really excited to bring you this chat, but again still having some microphone issues. Still some trial an error!

Nicolas Goupil joins me to chat about his work spanning everything from forming early childhood memories, to visual cognition, to hierarchies in groups. It's a fun, wide ranging conversation and we cover a good bit of ground, from developmental cognitive neuroscience to social cognition.

In Copenhagen for a few months, so the next several episode will be on the road. Sorry if the audio quality is not as good as usual!

How do our biases interfere with our willingness to learn?

Pelin Kasar and Juliette Vazard both return to the podcast for a chat at the intersection of beliefs, biases, and curiosity.

We talk about curiosity -- how to define it, its emotional role, and its relationship with learning -- and about biases -- what a bias is, its implications in society, and its relationship to curiosity.

The conversation covers a lot of ground as we work through definitions and reach mutual understandings of each of the terms,

Guest: Pelin Kasar

Guest: Juliette Vazard

To hear more from Pelin check out Episode 6 and Episode 28

To hear more from Juliette check out Episode 20 and Episode 24

Resource management is a difficult problem. Deciding who gets access to certain resources, and how much of it they have access to, can often be existential struggle. This is complicated with issues of historical access of particular groups, over exploited ecosystems nearing collapse, and geopolitical shifts that lead to changes in demand.

We sit down with Arev Papazian to chat about the difficulties of delegation and determining permissions. We cover some of the ground regarding the challenges of maintaining a healthy ecosystem, one that includes humans, when there are so many stakeholders involved (not all of them altruistic).

Guest: Arev Papazian

What makes someone a good source to learn from?

Melissa Koenig explains how we learn from others: from the strategies we use to the biases we lean on when making epistemic decisions. We chat about the emergence of racial and gender biases and how we often seek information from sources that we identify with, covering the dynamics of of social identities and justice. And we end with chatting about the role of science in society and the importance of not separating work and activism.

Melissa Koenig is a professor at the Institute of Child Development

This is the first time trying out recording on the road, sorry for the clumsiness of the audio and video but learned a few good things for next time!

Joining the podcast is Reto Schneider, veteran science journalist who has dealt with everything from the science of opinion formation to the origins of land ownership and seemingly everything in between.

We talk about a variety of things that have become mild obsessions for him over the years including things like his decades long monthly column on obscure science experiments, data scientists trying to predict the future, and the arbitrariness of prison sentences. 

For more, check out:

Reto's website

Reto's Wikipedia page

Making sense of a series of graphic representations is not simple, but our brains manage to do it with little effort.

Our conversation with Neil Cohn starts out with a rethinking of language, moving from an understanding built solely on spoken language to the ability to express meaning across a range of modalities. This moves us into Neil's work on how we develop the ability to understand visual narratives and what this means for our understanding of language as a whole.

We chat about emojis, comics, children's books, and a bunch of other fun stuff.

Guest: Neil Cohn (personal website)

Links to everything on the Monkey Dance website:

https://www.monkeydancepod.com/episodes/episode-26

And how can complexity science help us understand them?

We sit down with network scientist Gabriela Juncosa to discuss how political discourse unfolds in online spaces and whether toxic interactions shut conversations down or keep them going. We chat about the structure of online discussions, how social media algorithms influence engagement, and whether the way we talk online differs from in-person interactions.

This takes us to the role of network structures in polarization, the ways AI might intervene in online discourse, and whether we can design digital spaces that foster both engagement and constructive dialogue.

Joining us as a cohost is philosopher Phyllis Pearson (our guest from Episode 24).

Guest: Gabriela Juncosa

Show notes on the Monkey Dance website