Public Presentation - Layla Unger, Ph.D. Faculty Candidate - Psychology Department
Candidate for a faculty position in the Department of Psychology
Layla Unger, Ph.D.
Department of Psychology
The Ohio State University
Building Rich World Knowledge from Everyday Experience
We humans spend years of development amassing a wealth of knowledge about the world around us. Starting early in childhood, we distill the varied hubbub of everyday experience into categories like apple, dog, and happy, enrich categories with conceptual knowledge such as that apples are healthy, link concepts to words, and even connect words for different concepts like “fruit” and “tree”. These interconnected knowledge networks are integral to human thought, pervading cognitive processes ranging from inferential reasoning to language comprehension. For example, to comprehend even a simple sentence like “Bears love honey so much they’re willing to risk getting stung” we need to pull in other, related concepts such as bee. In this talk, I’ll provide an overview of a program of work designed to illuminate the facets of experience and learning mechanisms that combine to build interconnected knowledge about the world. This research integrates several approaches including behavioral and eye tracking methods, corpus analyses of children’s day-to-day experiences, Bayesian hierarchical analysis of individual- and group-level patterns, and computational models of candidate learning processes.
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Open to the Public
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No