Canada

Democracy is in retreat worldwide. Even formerly stable democracies such as the U.S. and U.K. have witnessed events and actions by leaders that are incompatible with democratic norms. The reasons for these trends are complex and difficult to disentangle, but commentators and researchers almost invariably invoke the spread of misinformation and social media as possible contributing factors to the erosion of democracy. I survey the pressure points between human cognition and the current architecture of social media and how these pressure points almost inevitably contribute to an erosion of democracy. In particular, I focus on the “attention economy”, algorithmic curation of content, and manipulative choice architectures, and how they facilitate behaviors and attitudes that are endangering the common knowledge base that is essential for democratic functioning. I then review potential technological and cognitive solutions to these problems.

CogSci 2022

Technology, Democracy, and Cognition: Pressure Points and Global Challenges

Truth and Responsibility
“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

Many consider anthropology to be a holistic social science dedicated to cross-cultural understanding as a way to reduce bigotry and more fully comprehend “what it means to be human.” Others push against this readily circulated origin story, arguing that “human” remains a highly contested, political category—evident as the presumed set of rights and protections associated with the “human” continue to be stripped away violently in the communities in which some of us live and work. Which violent histories and epistemologies must anthropologists take responsibility for in telling truth(s) about the discipline’s development? How do the dual histories of settler colonialism and slavery continue to influence anthropological thought and practices? In these political times, how can anthropologists throughout the globe work to secure a capacious, progressive vision of the human? How might movements for anti-racism, decoloniality, queer liberation, and healing such as #BlackLivesMatter, #ProtectMaunaKea, and #MeToo push a future anthropology out of the ashes of the anthropological past? Finally, what are the limits and possibilities of the anthropological imagination?

Across subfields, we find truths in patterns of human behavior, language, evolution, and cultural worlds. Industry-positioned anthropologists do this by extending the boundaries of the discipline not as an administrative solution to job shortages but as a source of intervention and knowledge production. Increasingly, anthropologists who make use of the scientific method question how status and identity help to decide which facts come to represent truth. How might quantitative researchers use our methods to identify patterned truths, and what responsibility do we hold in challenging conventional wisdom about these patterns? What responsibility do we have to both our colleagues and larger publics, to push toward increased transparency and ethical grounding in our data collection, analysis, and presentation?

Pedagogy is a key medium for the communication of anthropological truths. Which (and whose) truths are foregrounded in our curricula? What are the possibilities for a liberatory pedagogy in a precarious, “post-truth” era? Conferences, museums, organizing spaces, and classrooms are sites where pedagogy and various forms of communication can help us interrogate the performativity of truth. How might anthropologists conceive of truth performances? Might visual, aural, and choreographic performances during AAA sessions offer anthropologists alternative genres for truth-telling and truth-making that provoke discussions about responsibility?

In accordance with the urgency of the year’s theme, the questions posed in this call for papers do not have easy answers. The hope is that those who submit proposals will take up these questions and engage in collective thinking and imagining about the truths we hold, the truths we challenge, and the responsibilities we bear in co-creating a free and more equitable world. All panel proposals should have a statement about how the panel has incorporated the goals of equity, diversity, and inclusion, and/or analysis of power.

Executive Session proposals have already been selected and speak directly to the theme “Truth and Responsibility.” To practice the critical reflexivity this call for papers invites, we asked that Executive Session submissions explicitly address the diversity of session participants, such as organizational/institutional affiliation, career stage, race, ethnicity, disability, sexuality, class, religion, national identity, and gender. Proposals for Executive Sessions that demonstrated a commitment to equity and inclusion and/or a clear analysis of power (i.e. anti-imperialist, anti-white supremacist, decolonial, anti-ableist, feminist, anti-transphobic, anti-xenophobic, etc) were given priority. We are excited to be in conversation with residents of the Baltimore region and look forward to the discussions, performances, and actions generated by the dynamic group of anthropologists attending the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting.

AAA Annual Meeting 2021

“Truth and Responsibility” is a call to reimagine anthropology to meet the demands of the present moment. The imperative to bear witness, take action, and be held accountable to the truths we write and circulate invites us to reflect on our responsibility in reckoning with disciplinary histories, harms, and possibilities. To whom are we giving evidence and toward what ends? For whom are we writing? To whom are we accountable, and in what ways? We are thrilled to announce the theme of the 2021 AAA Annual Meeting to be held in Baltimore, MD: Truth and Responsibility.

invited talk

Join us for CogSci2022! Our 44th Annual Conference will be centered around the theme of diversity, with an accompanying range of keynotes and invited speakers who themselves highlight the diversity of our field. Our three symposia are Cognition across Diverse Populations, Cognition within Diverse Societies, and Global Challenges for Cognitive Science. The conference is being offered in a fully hybrid environment for onsite and online attendees.
 
 [**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/07/Cogsci-2022-PAAG-Detailed-July-12final-1.pdf)
 [**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/DeArmond-CogSci2022-program-v113-final.pdf)

This conference requires a registration to attend. Please use the link below to secure your ticket. The website will be available to all registered attendees on July 25th. 

[Register to Attend](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/registration/)

Registration Is Required

The 44th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society highlighted research on the theme Cognitive Diversity in addition to the full breadth and diversity of research topics offered by the society’s membership. 





How does the brain represent different modes of information? Can we design a system that can automatically understand what the user is thinking? We can make progress towards answering such questions by studying brain recordings from devices such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The brain encoding problem aims to automatically generate fMRI brain representations given a stimulus. The brain decoding problem is the inverse problem of reconstructing the stimuli given the fMRI brain representation. Both the brain encoding and decoding problems have been studied in detail in the past two decades and the foremost attraction of studying these solutions is that they serve as additional tools for basic research in cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience. Recently, inspired by the effectiveness of deep learning models for natural language processing and computer vision, such models have been applied for neuroscience as well. In this tutorial, we plan to discuss different kinds of stimulus representations, and popular encoding and decoding architectures in detail. The tutorial will provide a working knowledge of the state of the art methods for encoding and decoding, a thorough understanding of the literature, and a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of encoding/decoding with deep learning.

Deep Learning for Brain Encoding and Decoding (1)

The spread of misinformation online is a global problem that requires global solutions. To that end, we conducted an experiment in 16 countries across 6 continents (N = 33,480) to investigate predictors of susceptibility to misinformation and interventions to combat misinformation. In every country, participants with a more analytic cognitive style and stronger accuracy-related motivations were better at discerning truth from falsehood; valuing democracy was also associated with greater truth discernment whereas political conservatism was negatively associated with truth discernment in most countries. Subtly prompting people to think about accuracy was broadly effective at improving the veracity of news that people were willing to share, as were minimal digital literacy tips. Finally, crowdsourced accuracy evaluation was able to differentiate true from false headlines with high accuracy in all countries. The consistent patterns we observe suggest that the psychological factors underlying the misinformation challenge are similar across the globe, and that similar solutions may be broadly effective. For pre-print PDF see https://psyarxiv.com/a9frz . For summary tweet thread see: https://twitter.com/DG_Rand/status/1493946312353619981?s=20 


Understanding and Reducing Online Misinformation Across 16 Countries on Six Continents

People learn to have emotions that fit the values central to their groups or cultures, and that benefit the types of relationships that are valued there. By sharing similar emotions, individuals align themselves –often unwittingly-- with these central values. Therefore, cultural variations in emotional phenomena can be understood from culturally normative relationship goals that tell individuals how to feel, when to feel and why to feel. Considered this way, having the “right” emotions is a key social competence in achieving belongingness and fit. In this talk I present cross-sectional, longitudinal and social network research on emotional acculturation, and its consequences for the belongingness and fit of immigrant minorities. I will also discuss how our insights on emotional acculturation may inform interventions to improve the belongingness of immigrant minorities.

Having the “right” emotions: The role of emotional acculturation in minority belonging

The spread of misinformation has substantially sped up in recent years, posing tangible risks to public health, democratic life, and the fight against climate change. For this reason, finding novel solutions to scale and reduce the time-intensive work of fact-checking agencies has become an urgent issue in social science. In this work, we evaluated crowdsourcing as a strategy to fact-check statements made by politicians, a type of misinformation that has been understudied in comparison to fake news. We performed a behavioural experiment (N=180) where the structure of social influence was manipulated, with the objective of identifying which communication network designs enhanced or undermined detection of 20 statements made by political leaders from a left-wing and a right-wing political party in Argentina. We found that crowds of laypeople are generally able to classify political discourse in a similar way as a fact-checking agency, but they are subject to partisan biases at the individual level. We also observed that social influence in heterogeneous dyadic interactions works as an antidote to these biases. Altogether, our results support recent efforts on developing crowdsourcing tools for aiding fact-checking over a variety of misinformation formats, adding a precautionary note on how partisanship may limit its performance, at least in the context of fact-checking politicians.

Crowdsourcing strategies to fact-check politicians are benefited from heterogeneous social influence

In the current globalized world, innovation in science and technology are vital for 
economic competitiveness, quality of life, and national security. This trend is accelerating the increasing reliance on virtual teams and their collaborative effort to solve complex environmental, 
social and public health problems. To contend with these dynamic conditions, communication, and 
collaborative problem-solving (CPS) competencies have taken a principal role in educational policy, research, and technology. Adaptive educational technologies provide a platform to deliver 
personalized training to improve learners’ CPS skills. However, for these systems to optimally 
tailor instruction, they must have key insights into learners’ interaction dynamics and team behaviors. We have been exploring these properties by employing Group Communication Analysis 
(GCA), a computational linguistics methodology for quantifying and characterizing the socio-cognitive processes between learners in online interactions. This talk will focus on recent studies 
where we have used GCA to gain a deeper understanding of role ecologies, learning and problemsolving, and issues of inclusivity in digitally mediated group interactions. The scalability of GCA 
opens the door for future research efforts directed towards improving collaborative competencies 
and creating more inclusive online interactions.

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