Psychoblog

Dear colleagues,

We (as the Department of Developmental Psychology) would like to invite you to a talk by Tobias Schuwerk (LMU München) on Thursday, 19 December 2019 at 12.15 (seminar room 2.111, Waldweg 26). In his talk, Dr. Schuwerk will speak about “Social Cognition and Social Interaction in Typical and Atypical Development” (see abstract below).

Also, below is the other colloquiums we are planning to have in the next couple of months. A more detailed information regarding these talks (e.g., title and abstract) will be announced later but you can save the dates already.

-January 23: Karolin Salmen (Heidelberg)
-January 30: Sabine Hunnius (Nijmwegen)
-Feb. 20: Juliane Bräuer (MPI Jena)
-March 5: Nicola Clayton (Cambridge)

We are looking forward to seeing you at our colloquiums.

Best wishes,
Feride N. Haskaraca Kizilay

Abstract: 

Social Cognition and Social Interaction in Typical and Atypical Development (Tobias Schuwerk)

Theory of Mind or mentalizing, the ability to attribute mental states to others and oneself, is considered being the bedrock of successful social interaction. Recent empirical evidence suggests that in typical development already infants are able to attribute false beliefs to others, a milestone of Theory of Mind development. In autism, it is hypothesized that difficulties in social interaction and communication arise from atypical mentalizing abilities. In the first part of this talk, I will (1) present empirical evidence that casts doubt on the assumption that already infants have a full-fledged Theory of Mind and (2) sketch a way out of the current replication crisis which is taken by the multi-lab project „ManyBabies 2“. In the second part of the talk, I will present data on how children and adults with autism perform in spontaneous mentalizing tasks borrowed from infancy research. The findings show that differences to non-autistic comparison groups are  only subtle and point to fast learning from experience. In the remainder of the talk, I will present a study testing the scope and ecological  validity of current social cognitive theories of autism by investigating  the link between autistic traits and actual mentalizing (assessed via  smartphone-based experience sampling) and social interaction (assessed  via logging of smartphone usage behavior) during everyday life.

„Registered Reports“-Session am 03.12., 16.15 Uhr

Am Dienstag, 03. Dezember lädt die Göttingen Open Source & Science Initiative of Psychology (GOSSIP) zu einer Session zum Thema “Registered Reports” ein. Die Session findet ab 16.15 Uhr in Raum 1.110 statt. Es soll zunächst darum gehen, über das vergleichsweise neue Publikationsformat zu informieren und dabei mit einigen verbreiteten „Mythen“ aufzuräumen. Alle Interessierten sind herzlich eingeladen. Veranstaltungssprache ist Englisch.

Abstract:
 
Registered reports have been praised by the scientific community as a powerful tool to increase the quality and credibility of research. More and more journals have started to introduce them as a publishing format for both original research and replication studies. Here, authors submit their research plan for peer review before data collection. In case of a positive evaluation, the editor grants conditional acceptance for publication prior to data collection and, hence, accepts the paper independent of the actual results. In this session, we want to promote registered reports as a potential publishing format for early career researchers (late-stage Master students, PhDs) and discuss the challenges and possibilities of registered reports. We also invite researchers more experienced with the traditional publication process who are interested in writing or supervising a registered report (Post-Docs, PIs, Professors). We will start with an introduction of registered reports and address some common „myths”. Julia Stern and Thomas Schultze-Gerlach will report their own experiences with registered reports as authors and editors. Finally, we will discuss the feasibility of making registered report part of your own research.

Dear colleagues,

We (as the Department of Developmental Psychology) would like to invite you to a talk by Manuel Bohn (MPI und Uni Leipzig) on Thursday, 28 November 2019 at 12.15 (seminar room 2.111, Waldweg 26). In his talk, Dr. Bohn will speak about “Rational speech-act theory and pragmatic development” (see abstract below).

We are looking forward to seeing you at our colloquium.

Best wishes,
Feride N. Haskaraca Kizilay

Abstract: Information integration in language learning across development

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret language in context. In my work, I take a pragmatic perspective on language development and argue for developmental continuity between early non-verbal communication, language learning, and linguistic pragmatics. These phenomena can be linked by relating them to a computational framework (the rational speech act (RSA) framework), which conceptualizes communication as fundamentally inferential and grounded in social cognition. This computational framework also provides a way to think about information integration. By drawing on experimental data from two recent projects, I will illustrate how RSA models can be used to test different hypothesis about the development of information integration during language learning.