Cognitive Science Colloquium: Hongjing Lu

Description

Dr. Hongjing Lu, Professor in the Departments of Psychology and Statistics at UCLA, will present on "Understanding physical and social actions." Humans are remarkably adept at perceiving physical and social events based on very limited visual information (e.g., movements of a few simple geometric shapes). However, it remains unclear what representations are deployed to achieve these abilities. In an effort to identify the key computational components, a unified psychological space is proposed that captures both the perception of physical events involving inanimate objects and the perception of social events involving human interactions with other agents.

This unified space consists of two prominent dimensions: an intuitive sense of whether physical laws are obeyed or violated; and an impression of whether an agent possesses intentions. Even when observing actions of a single actor, people are sensitive to the cause-effect relation between limb movements guided by intention and body displacements that obey physical laws. By 12 months, children show sensitivity to the consistency between intention and physical constraints in actions. A MEG study showed that relative to action recognition, action understanding requires additional processing time coupled with greater involvement of frontal and parietal areas.