Megan Robbins: UC Riverside Department of Psychology This talk discusses the potential of a novel naturalistic observation method, the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), for studying health-relevant social processes. The EAR is a portable audio recorder that periodically records snippets of ambient sounds from participants’ momentary environments. In tracking moment-to-moment ambient sounds, it yields acoustic logs […]

Peter Todd: Indiana University Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences The need to find nourishing foods is a selective pressure that may have shaped many human cognitive processes, from perception to memory. In this talk, I present some of our efforts to uncover such domain-specific influences. Hurlbert and Ling (2007) suggested that an ancestral sexual […]

Fei Xu: UC Berkeley Department of Psychology, Infant Cognition and Language LabThe study of cognitive development has often been framed in terms of the nativist/empiricist debate. Here I present a new approach to cognitive development: rational constructivism. I will argue that learners take into account both prior knowledge and biases (learned or unlearned) as well […]