Thursday Morning Talk

Michael Pauen

On ZOOM (Contact communication@scioi.de for link)

BIO: Michael Pauen is a philosopher with a focus on the philosophy of mind. As the academic director of an interdisciplinary graduate school, he has extensive experience in interdisciplinary research and training. Having a specific interest in philosophical and psychological aspects of human sociality, he will focus on social intelligence both in humans and in

Distinguished Speaker Series

Naomi Leonard, Princeton University (hosted by Jörg Raisch): Opinion Dynamics with Tunable Sensitivity: Consensus, Dissensus, and Cascades

I will present a model of continuous-time opinion dynamics for an arbitrary number of agents that communicate over a network and form real-valued opinions about an arbitrary number of options.  The model generalizes linear and nonlinear models in the literature. Drawing from biology, physics, and social psychology, we introduce an attention parameter to modulate social

PI Lecture

Ralph Hertwig: Experimenting with Intelligence

On ZOOM (Contact us for Link)

Experimenting with Intelligence Abstract. Within just 7 years, behavioral decision research in psychology underwent a dramatic change. In 1967, Peterson and Beach (1967a) reviewed more than 160 experiments concerned with people’s statistical intuitions. Invoking the metaphor of the mind as an intuitive statistician, they concluded that “probability theory and statistics can be used as the

Distinguished Speaker Series

Patricia Churchland (University of California, San Diego), The Neurobiological Platform for Moral Intuitions

On ZOOM (Contact us for Link)

ABSTRACT: Self-preservation is embodied in our brain’s circuitry: we seek food when hungry, warmth when cold, and mates when lusty. In the evolution of the mammalian brain, circuitry for regulating one’s own survival and well-being was modified. For sociality, the important result was that the ambit of me extends to include others -- me-and-mine. Offspring, mates, and kin came

PI Lecture

Olaf Hellwich

The Zoom Link will be sent the day before the lecture. (Contact communication@scioi.de for specific questions)

Thursday Morning Lecture with John A. Nyakatura (MoA), “Reverse-engineering the locomotion of a stem amniote – insights from a multidisciplinary approach”

Reconstructing the locomotion of key vertebrate fossil specimens offers insights into their palaeobiology and helps to conceptualize major transitions in vertebrate evolution. A unique combination of an articulated nearly complete early land-living vertebrate fossil specimen and fossilized trackways was the starting point for an in-depth reconstruction of the locomotion based on the integration of image-based

PI Lecture with Alan Akbik

The Zoom Link will be sent the day before the lecture. (Contact communication@scioi.de for specific questions)

Thursday Morning Talk

Christa Thöne-Reinecke, “Ethical Justification of Animal Experiments in Germany”

All animal ethical positions are largely in agreement that animals – as beings capable of suffering – must be morally considered for their own sake and that certain consequences for one's own actions must be derived from this. This insight has been incorporated into animal protection legislation based on the EU Directive 2010/63. German legislation

PI Lecture

Rasha Abdel Rahman, “How intelligent is visual perception?”

Visual perception is shaped by the input from our physical environment and by expectations derived from our sensory experience with the visual world. But is what we see also influenced by higher cognitive capacities such as memories, language, semantic knowledge or (true or false) beliefs? And if so, what are the consequences on how we

Thursday Morning Talk

Alice Auersperg, “COCKATOOLS: Innovative tool use and manufacture in the Goffin’s cockatoo”

Finding flexible tool use and manufacture in non-specialized animals, may contribute to our understanding of the origins of tool-related cognition. Goffin's cockatoos are Indonesian parrots that originate from a small archipelago in the Moluccas. They are highly opportunist generalists that forage on a large number of different and often patchily distributed or seasonal resources. Accordingly,

Thursday Morning Lecture with Falk Lieder: “Understanding and Improving Human Learning and Decision-Making”

One of its most remarkable features of human intelligence is the mind's ability to discover and continuously refine its own algorithms. This enables people to discover clever heuristics for mastering most everyday decisions very efficiently. But some less familiar situations require different decision strategies that many people haven’t had a chance to discover yet. In

Winter School “Ethics of Neuroscience and AI”

The 10th Winter School "Ethics of Neuroscience and AI" is taking place on March 8-12, 2021. It is organized by the BCCN Berlin/ICCN, the Berlin School of Mind and Brain, and the Excellence Cluster "Science of Intelligence". The event is tailored for MSc and PhD students, but covers a range of topics of potential interest