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Title: The Bare Stage Before the Mind's Eye

Speaker: Tomer Ullman, Morris Kahn Associate Professor of Psychology in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University

Abstract: When we imagine things, many of us have the impression that we create full, rich, vivid scenes. But, we also have the impression of a full, rich world before us in perception, and decades of cognitive science have proven us wrong. I'll examine how recent work shows that when we imagine, we may only be creating partial scenes, leaving parts of the scene uncommitted, with much of the work of the imagination done by rough-and-ready representations.

Speaker Bio: Tomer Ullman is a cognitive scientist interested in commonsense reasoning, and building computational models for explaining high-level cognitive processes and the acquisition of new knowledge by children and adults. In particular, he is focused on how children and adults come to form intuitive theories of agents and objects, and providing both a functional and algorithmic account of how these theories are learned. Such an account would go a long way towards explaining the basics cogs and springs of human intelligence, and support the building of more human-like artificial intelligence. Dr. Ullman received in B.Sc in Cognitive Science and Physics from Hebrew University in 2008, and his Ph.D. in Brain and Cognitive Sciences from MIT in 2015. From 2015-2018 he was a post-doctoral associate at the Center for Brains, Minds, and Machines.

Lunch will be served at 11:45 am and the lecture will begin at 12:00 pm