The Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence Program and Students’ Association at the University of Toronto present: UTISM – a biennial conference that brings together individuals from diverse perspectives to promote an interdisciplinary intellectual exchange on the study of the mind. The theme of this year's symposium is “The Place of Emotion in the Cognitive Sciences.”

UTISM 2010 will be an opportunity for students and scholars to collectively reflect on the place and role of the emotions in a field whose research has too often been fixated on purely cognitive phenomena. This kind of attitude has been exemplified since the origins of cognitive science in research which focused on reasoning, and viewed abstracted problem solving as the paradigm case of the cognitive act. In contrast, this year’s symposium hopes to explore the meaning and implications of the “extra-cognitive” engagement of agents with their world. For while we undoubtedly think and reason about our world, we also care about that engagement.

What insights can be gained by including affective factors of cognition in our study of the mind?
What insights might have been missed by ignoring these factors?
How does emotion fit into current models of the mind in the cognitive sciences?

UTISM 2010 will be an interactive forum for individuals to exchange their views on these issues.

Form and function in facial expressions of emotion
Adam Anderson, University of Toronto

According to his modern interpreters, one of Darwin’s most significant contributions to psychology and neuroscience is that emotions and their expression are independent natural kinds. Overlooked, however, was Darwin’s original thesis that emotional expressions are not distinct but rather reflect structural oppositions derived from some original functional adaptation. I will present evidence that
1) emotional expression appearance and perception reflects oppositions in global form
2) the origin of these oppositions lies in a primitive sensory regulatory function for interactions with the physical environment and
3) that these sensory regulatory functions have been co-opted for the purposes of regulating social behavior.

Use of the disappointing gift paradigm in the study of emotion regulation and psychopathology in middle childhood
Neely Bakshi, University of Toronto

Many aspects of psychopathology reflect core disturbances in emotion regulation. For example, anxiety disorders such as social phobia have been linked to the dampening of positive affect. The development of affect regulation appears to take place early in life. Therefore, the understanding of psychopathology emergence necessitates an investigation of its likely origins in childhood. One model that has been used to study emotional regulation in childhood is the disappointing gift paradigm as developed by Saarni and later modified by Col. In this paradigm, children are put in a situation where they receive desirable and undesirable gifts, and are then observed and rated as to their ability to suppress a dominant response (e.g., disappointment or frustration) and perform a subdominant response (e.g., pleasure) that is dictated by situational demands (presence versus absence of the experimenter who gives the gift). Given the clear importance of affect regulation in psychopathology emergence, responses in this paradigm should yield clinically useful information in the prediction of common and specific forms of psychiatric diagnoses. In our proposed study, we will be administering the disappointing gift paradigm to children between the ages of 8 and 10. As each child is taken through the experimental situation, they will be videotaped. A standardized protocol will be used to code for each child’s display of negative (anger, sadness, fear) and positive (positive affect, surprise) emotion on the videotape. Each child will also be administered the Computerized Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (C-DISC), which will identify six primary diagnostic categories of childhood psychopathology. The child’s primary caregiver will be interviewed and administered the C-DISC Child Behavior Checklist (CBCL). Using regression-based methods, we will examine the association between levels of positive and negative emotion that are exhibited by children in the paradigm with reported symptoms along the internalizing (e.g. anxiety, depression) spectrum. The disappointing gift paradigm has not been previously administered to children of this age group, and its ability to predict psychopathology in middle childhood will be an especially important development, given that many psychiatric disorders have their clinical onset in adolescence. In addition, this proposed study will be the first to use the paradigm in predicting the internalizing spectrum of psychopathology. It will ultimately allow us to have a greater understanding of emotion regulation in childhood, and how certain emotional patterns may predispose to early and potentially longstanding symptoms. Knowledge of such patterns may lead to therapeutic interventions that can prevent the onset of major psychiatric disorders, which would prove beneficial to both the individual and society.

From oral to moral: Adventures in the evolutionary psychology of emotion and morality
Hanah Chapman, University of Toronto

Charles Darwin was perhaps the first to suggest that complex human emotions may have evolved from simpler precursors. In this talk I will present a series of experiments that we conducted to test this hypothesis, as it applies to the emotion of moral disgust. We examined the purported origin of moral disgust in oral disgust by searching for continuity in the facial motor activity evoked by gustatory distaste, basic disgust, and moral disgust elicited by unfair treatment in an economic game. We found all three states evoked activation of the levator labii muscle region of the face, characteristic of an oral-nasal rejection response. These results provide direct evidence of the primitive oral origins of moral disgust.

Cognitive science and understanding movies
Keith Oatley, University of Toronto

Plays, novels, and movies, are simulations of the social world. They were the first simulations. They run not on computers but on the software of minds, on the hardware of brains. We now understand some of the cognitive workings of fiction. Fiction film is not a medium in which you see on the screen what you would have seen if you had been there. It is composed of careful juxtapositions of shots, in sequences and from positions you could never occupy in ordinary life. Its intention is prompt viewers towards progressions of emotions, by drawing on such psychological processes as empathy, about which recent fMRI studies have taught us a great deal. Film is a language we have to learn. We understand its processes as including cues (or instructions) that enable viewers to start up simulations and make them run, in ways that are engaging, enjoyable, and occasionally insightful.

The role of motivation and emotion in perceptual and cognitive framing
Jordan Peterson, University of Toronto

People look at the world through a narrow lens – more precisely, through a series of concentric, narrow lenses. This is necessary because the almost infinite complexity of the world makes its radical simplification necessary, as human individuals are comparatively low capacity processors. The embodied constraints placed on perception and cognition by motivation are the result of Darwinian pruning, a process that has unfolded over centuries, and arguably the only manner in which the frame problem can be even partially solved.

Epistemic feelings
Ronald de Sousa, University of Toronto

Somewhere along the course of evolution, and at some time in any one of us on the way from zygote to adult, some forms of detection became beliefs, and some tropisms turned into deliberate desires. Two transitions are involved: from functional responses to intentional ones, and from non-conscious processes to conscious ones that presuppose language and are powered by neocortical resources. Unconscious and functional mental processes remain, and constitute an ‘intuitive’ system that collaborates uneasily with the conscious intentionality of the ‘analytic’ system. Emotions bridge these divides: in particular, specific feelings affect inference, cognition and metacognition. In what follows, after a brief reminder of the crucial role of emotions to rational thought and action in general, I first look at how fear affects belief. I then narrow my focus to some intrinsically epistemic feelings. Theseinclude specialized variants of fear and greed; and feelings of doubt, certainty, knowing and familiarity. I shall also describe some surprising recent finding about the influence of oxytocin on trust, and about the direct influence of social conformity on perception and belief.

Three visions of the nature of cognitive science
John Vervaeke, University of Toronto

This talk will compare three progressively stronger visions of what cognitive science is: generic nominalism, inter-theoretic eclecticism, and synoptic integration. It will be argued that the strongest vision is the best, and that it can be understood in terms of higher order inference to the best explanation that makes use of plausibility reasoning. The goal of such synoptic integration is to facilitate and enable the individual cognitive sciences to explicitly carry out the naturalistic imperative to analyze, formalize, and mechanize our explanation of the mind and thereby complete the scientific revolution. Finally it will be argued that each vision of cognitive science has pedagogical implications which will also be compared.

TBA
Marc Lewis, University of Toronto

Invigilator: Prof. James John

Date: March 6–7, 2010
Location: University College, University of Toronto St. George Campus (Map 1, Map 2)

All talks take place in UC 140.

We invite submissions of original papers from undergraduate and graduate students of cognitive science and its cognate disciplines (philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, robotics, etc.) to the 4th University of Toronto Interdisciplinary Symposium on the Mind (UTISM).

UTISM is a biennial conference that brings together students and scholars for stimulating interdisciplinary exchange on topics related to the mind.

The theme of this year's symposium is “The Place of Emotions in the Cognitive Sciences”. We hope to give students and scholars a chance to collectively reflect on the place and role of the emotions in a field whose research focus has too often been on purely cognitive phenomena. This kind of attitude has been exemplified since the origins of cognitive science in research which focused on reasoning, and viewed abstracted problem solving as the paradigm case of the cognitive act. In contrast, this year's symposium hopes to explore the meaning and implications of the "extra-cognitive" engagement of agents with their world. For while we undoubtedly think and reason about our world, we also care about that engagement.

Papers submitted are expected to be on this theme. They will be refereed in either the undergraduate or the graduate category, according to the first author's student status at the time of submission. Papers co-authored with non-student researchers are acceptable, but the first author, who shall also be the presenter if the paper is accepted, must be a student. Papers shall not exceed 2500 words and shall include on the first page an abstract, names of the authors, their affiliations, their student status, and contact details but leave out any author or institution identifying information from subsequent pages. Only electronic copies in PDF, DOC or PS formats are accepted. Papers may be accepted either for a poster session during the conference or for presentation. Undergraduate and grad student presenters will have 15-20 minutes in which to present.

Submissions shall be emailed to utism.submission@cogsci.ca Papers will be considered for both oral and poster presentation unless the authors explicitly indicate otherwise on the first page. The submission deadline is February 12. Authors will be notified of the decision on their submission by February 25. Revised versions of an accepted paper shall be received by March 1.

Ticket price includes:
– Free lunch, coffee and snacks
– Full access to all talks and poster sessions
– Wine and cheese reception

Once you have registered please remember to bring your photo ID (student ID) to the registration desk on the days of the events in order to pick up your registration package. The registration desk will remain open until 4:00pm on Saturday and 12:00pm on Sunday.

* Student ID required