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Rutgers Symposium on Learning II

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Object Cognition: Underlying mechanisms and their origins

Friday May 21st & Saturday 22nd, 1999

Recent advances suggest that objects fundamentally structure both adult visual attention and early infant knowledge.
Do common cognitive and brain mechanisms underlie both adult visual attention and early infant object knowledge?

The symposium brings together for the first time leading cognitive scientists studying attention in adults and in infants
to explore parallels and differences between their two fields of study.

Program:

Friday, May 21, 1999

8:30 Coffee
9:00 Dean Richard Foley
Welcoming remarks9:15 Elizabeth Spelke
Core knowledge and cognitive processes

10:00 Anne Treisman
Object files in perception and memory

10:45 Break for refreshments

11:00 Alan Leslie
Change blindness and multiple object tracking in infants

11:45 Jacob Feldman
Steps toward a theory of perceptual objects

12:30 General Discussion
1:00 Break for Lunch

2:00 Zenon Pylyshyn
Connecting thoughts and things: Tracking as the defining paradigm

2:45 Susan Carey
Establishing representations of new individuals: New infant results and old studies by Michotte

3:30 Break for refreshments

3:45 Patrick Cavanagh
Spatial and temporal resolution of attention

4:30 General Discussion
5:00 End of first session

 Saturday, May 22, 1999

9:00 Coffee
9:30 Renee Baillargeon 
What information do infants include in their event representations?10:15 Glyn Humphreys
Object-coding structures spatial  representation: Evidence from normality and pathology 

11:00 Break for refreshments

11:15 Fei Xu
Object individuation in infancy: The role of attention mechanisms and  language learning 

12:00 General Discussion
12:30 Break for Lunch

1:30 Brian Scholl 
Objecthood in cognitive development and visual attention 

2:15 Karen Wynn
Some surprising failures in infants’ reasoning about objects: Object tracking processes and infants’ appreciation of object principles

3:00 Break for refreshments

3:15 Nancy Kanwisher
Neural correlates of object-based attention

4:00 General Discussion
5:00 Close

 Speakers:
Dr. Renee Baillargeon (Professor of  Psychology, University of Illinois)
Dr. Susan Carey (Professor of Psychology, New York  University)
Dr. Patrick Cavanagh (Professor of Psychology,  Harvard University)
Dr. Jacob Feldman (Assistant Professor of Psychology, Rutgers University)
Dr. Richard Foley (Dean of FAS and Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers)
Dr. Glyn Humphreys (Professor of Psychology, University of Birmingham, UK)
Dr. Nancy Kanwisher (Associate Professor of Psychology, MIT)
Dr. Alan M. Leslie (Professor of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Rutgers University)
Dr. Zenon Pylyshyn (Board of Governors Professor of Cognitive Science, Rutgers University)
Brian Scholl (Graduate Student, Rutgers University)
Dr. Elizabeth Spelke (Professor of Psychology, MIT)
Dr. Anne Treisman (James S.McDonnell Distinguished University Professor of Psychology, Princeton University)
Dr. Karen Wynn (Associate Professor  of Psychology, Arizona University)
Dr. Fei Xu (Assistant Professor, Northeastern University)

Organizers: Kathy VanderGoot and Alan Leslie