Cognitive Science Colloquia Past Years

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Back to this year's colloquia: 2021-2022

Past years:

2020-2021

Academic Year (2020-2021)

Spring Semester

A Scientific Reconstruction of Panpsychism
by Asst. Prof. Dr. Majid D. Beni (Philosophy, METU)
on 14th of April

Abstract There are two well-known arguments for panpsychism. These are arguments from intrinsic nature and argument from continuity. While the arguments have recent notable philosophical advocates, scientific grounds for their plausibility have not been explored. The talk reviews predictive processing theory under Free Energy Principle to reconstruct these arguments. It argues that to the extent that scientific grounds are at issue, there is no discontinuity between the intelligent and non-intelligent. Then substantiate this insight through a reconstruction of the argument from intrinsic nature.

Webinar Record

Passcode: #.1#kkm$

Eğer BelÖ’ler Evreyse, Şimdi Ne Olacak?
by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Özgen (Linguistics, Dokuz Eylül University)
on 31st of March

Abstract Öbeklerin evreliği konusundaki ilgili alanyazın öbeklerin arakesit özelliklerini ortaya çıkaran tanılar ortaya koymaktadır. Evre olarak varsayılan standart öbekler e*Ö (Chomsky 2000 ve izleyen çalışmaları), TÖ (Chomsky 2000 ve izleyen çalışmaları), BelÖ/aÖ (Chomsky 2006, Hiraiwa 2005, Marantz 2007, Ott 2008 ve Svenious 2004) ve iÖ (Abels 2003, Raposo 2002, Svenonius 2003 ve van Riemsdijk 1978) olarak biçimlenir. Bu sunuda, tartışmaya başlamadan önce Türkçedeki adcıl öbeklerin BelÖ karş. AÖ etiketlerini ele alıp Türkçede de BelÖ varsayımının geçerliğini savunacağım. Sonra, ilk olarak, BelÖ’lerin Türkçede evre olup olmadığı sorusuna yanıt arayacağım. İzleyen tartışmada, Olumsuz Kutup Birimleri’nin lisanslanması ve bağlama olgusunun adcıl öbekler içindeki görünümünü betimleyeceğim. Bu iki dilbilgisel olgunun, alanyazında eşsüremsiz dağıtım (Felser, 2004, Marušič 2008) olarak bilinen olguyla ilişkisini ele alıp sunuyu sonlandıracağım.

Webinar Record

Passcode: 2aFz+qN6

Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Tutoring Systems
by Assoc. Dr. Meltem Eryılmaz (Computer Engineering, Atılım University)
on 24th of March

Abstract The field of Artificial Intelligence in Education (AI-ED) has become an important and challenging research area in recent years, which aims to deliver the educational knowledge-based systems to be used in actual teaching and learning. The ability of AI techniques to imitate the intelligence of human being and ability to solve complex problems makes them an ideal tool in e-learning. In order to achieve a good learning platform which has an ability to learn from uncertain, vague, and incomplete data, numerous AI techniques such as Fuzzy logic, Bayesian Networks, Artificial Neural Networks, Genetic algorithms. Intelligent Systems, Teaching Aspects, Learning Aspects, Cognitive Science, Knowledge Structure, Tools & Shells, and Interfaces are the main research areas of AI in education. The use of AI techniques in educational systems influenced the evolution from Computer Assisted Instruction (CAI) to Intelligent Tutoring Systems (ITSs). Researchers have attempted to incorporate intelligence into knowledge and problem-solving areas, as well as in tutoring students in order to create an expert learning system capable of providing individualized instruction. ITS appears in an intersection area that includes computer science, psychology, and educational research which is referred to as ʻcognitive science’.

Webinar Record

Passcode: IS78=0?3

Academic Year (2019-2020)

Spring Semester

Idiosyncrasy in Grammar
by Prof. Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 6th of May

Abstract In the talk I will suggest that idiosyncrasy is not something to be shunned in grammar. At least certain kinds of idiosyncrasies, for example, idioms and multi-word expressions (MWEs), reveal some degrees of freedom from the data that must be a reflection of what theory of grammar provides. And, idiosyncrasy of the expression is what the child takes in from day one, whether we believe it is interpreted under the guidance of universal grammar or universal conceptual structure.

Idioms and MWEs can be shown to allow paracompositional treatment, linking predicate-argument structure to event structure at the level of the lexicon. If we assume that semantics is not an appendix to syntax, and that it can be done in lock-step with syntax and phonology, without assumptions of isomorphy, then the vocabulary that such a theory of grammar must provide will look different than generative grammar, construction grammar and cognitive grammar. The vocabulary can treat these kinds of idiosyncrasies as realizations of hitherto unexplored but available grammar options. I will exemplify from English and Turkish.

A New Generalization Over Determiner Denotations
by İsa Kerem Bayırlı (TOBB)
on 11th of March

Abstract A well-known claim about natural language determiners is that they obey the Conservativity Constraint (Barwise and Cooper,1981, Keenan and Stavi,1986 a.o.), which implies that natural language determiners denote CONS1 relations (i.e. DE(A,B) ⇔ DE(A,A∩B)). In this talk, we suggest that this constraint is too permissive in that it allows for various determiners that we do not observe in natural languages. We claim that, in addition to CONS1 relations, natural language determiners denote semi-conservative relations on their second argument (semi-CONS2), where semi-conservativity is defined as:

A determiner relation D (over some E) is semi-conservative on its second member (semi-CONS2) iff for any A,B ⊆ E, DE(A,B) ⇒ DE(A∩B, B)

There are some determiner candidates that denote CONS1 relations but not semi-CONS2 relations. This list includes (a) negated universal determiners (“not every”, “not all”), (b) the determiner “few” in its proportional partitive (i.e. “few of the”) interpretation, (c) proportional partitives (“half”, “one-third of”, “fifty percent of”) in their bounded (“exactly”) interpretations and (d) universal exceptives (“every ... except John/Mary”,”all ... but Mary”). In this talk, we claim that such expressions are either not determiners or the problematic inferences associated with them come from a source distinct from their denotations.

A Fair version of the Chinese Room
by Hasan Cagatay (Ankara Sosyal Bilimler Universitesi (ASBU))
on 4th of March

Abstract Over the last two decades, computational analysis of facial expressions has been a very active area of research. Today, following the recent dramatic advances in the fields of machine learning and computer vision, we are able to model subtle and complex patterns of facial responses in a reliable manner. Our findings indicate that facial expressions do not only reveal instant emotional state of individuals but also display hereditary and behavioral characteristics. This talk will focus on deep architectures to model such patterns for various tasks such as recognizing preferences, assessing psychopathology, and predicting how your future child's expressions look like.

Modeling Hereditary and Behavioral Patterns of Facial Expressions
by Hamdi Dibeklioglu (Bilkent)
on 26th of February

Algorithmic Identification of Observers in Arbitrary Dynamical Systems
by Gülce Kardeş (Physics, METU)
on 19th of February

Abstract Since Shannon’s introduction to information theory, we have tended to fix our attention to a syntactic analysis of information. Yet a profound disclosure of meaning in information is reported by a group of systems (e.g. biological organisms) that use information from their environment which causally contributes to their ability of maintaining existence. In this study, we consider the problem of identifying such systems, called observers, that render a priori companion of semantic information (Kolchin- sky and Wolpert, 2018) possible. We introduce spin models as a platform in which we construct an identification procedure. Our findings present the physical properties of spin systems that have determinant role in specifying observers. We also investigate further characteristics of semantic information, and list several implications to discuss the applicability of our work to any physical system.

Fall Semester

Quasi-supervision for morphology learning without morphological analysis
by Prof. Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 18th of December

Abstract Learning the meaning of sublexical elements is a main concern in language understanding. Turkish children do that quite early. We report some experiments that we do at ODTU, Hacettepe and Groningen which treats morphology as learning from a latent variable, using phonology, semantics and lexicon, and without prior morphological analysis or information.

Counter-expectational sense in Turkish and in general
by Ceyhan Temürcü (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 4th of December

Abstract In an attempt to inaugurate a line of research we started with Deniz Zeyrek two years ago, I will outline our proposal for analyzing the functioning of counter-expectational (CE) markers. Apparently, all human languages have strategies for challenging possible inferences from a preceding clause or discourse segment. This sense, which take part in the semantic ranges in Turkish ama or fakat, and of English but, has often been dubbed 'counter-expectational' and subsumed under the more general family of 'contrastive' senses. I this talk I will (i) provide critical data that reveals some semantic and pragmatic ingredients of the CE sense, (ii) propose a descriptive specification for this sense and (iii) provide prospects for a formal treatment of CE in a multi-layered version of DRT, which distinguishes temporal, epistemic, volitional, and illocutionary layers.

Visual perception of human and robot actions: Interdisciplinary studies between cognitive neuroscience and social robotics
by Dr. Burcu Ayşen Ürgen (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 27th of November

Abstract In the first part of talk, I will talk about an fMRI study in which we investigate the representational properties of the human action observation network. More specifically, I will present data that show how the human brain represents evolutionarily new, human-specific actions such as writing and drawing. In the second part, I will talk about an EEG study that shows how we can utilize our knowledge of the human action observation network for designing social robots that can interact with humans successfully.

Annotation as a science: Lessons learnt from discourse annotation
by Dr. Deniz Zeyrek (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 20th of November

Abstract In this talk, I will talk about aspects of transferring the theoretical formulation of discourse phenomena, based on empirical observations, into a model that can be used for the specification of linguistic annotation. I will outline the procedure in general terms, concentrating on my work in Turkish Discourse Bank and TED Multilingual Discourse Bank.

TÜRKÇE İÇİN GÖZETİMSİZ SÖZDİZİMSEL BELİRSİZLİK GİDERME
by Özkan Aslan (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 13th of November

Abstract Doğal dillerde bir tümce, her biri farklı yapısal yorumlara karşılık gelen birden çok sözdizim ağacı ile gösterilebilir. Bu durum sözdizimsel belirsizlik olarak adlandırılır. Sözdizimsel belirsizlik giderme, basitçe, tümceden elde edilen sözdizim ağaçlarının bağlama göre en uygun olandan en az uygun olana doğru sıralanmasıdır. Bu tezde, sözdizimsel belirsizlik giderme problemi Türkçe için ele alınmış ve gözetimsiz yönteme dayanan bir çözüm önerilmiştir. Yöntemin gözetimsiz olarak adlandırılmasının nedeni sözdizim ağaçlarının sıralanmasında kullanılan olasılık modellerinin imlenmemiş bir metin koleksiyonundan elde edilmiş olmasıdır. Tez kapsamında, sözdizimsel belirsizlik giderme işini gerçekleştirmek amacıyla, sözdizimsel çözümleyici, Morfolog adlı biçimbilimsel çözümleyici ve TrLex adlı sözlükçe gibi özgün altyapı ögeleri tasarlanmış ve bunları eşgüdümlü biçimde yöneten TMoST adlı bir dizge oluşturulmuştur. Ayrıca öbek yapı dilbilgisine dayanan yeni bir tümce çözümleme gösterimi önerilmiş ve bu gösterimde biçimbilimsel ve sözdizimsel yapıları birlikte işleyebilmeyi sağlayan ve dizimbirim adı verilen yeni bir kavram tanıtılmıştır. Çalışmada, bazıları özgün olan 24 olasılık modeli kullanılmıştır. Modellerin problem üzerindeki başarımını ölçmeye imkân veren AUT adlı bir ağaç yapılı derlem üretilmiştir. Alanyazında sözdizimsel belirsizlik giderme için başarım, en uygun ağacın sıralamada bulunduğu konum ile veya birinci sıradaki ağacın en uygun ağaca olan benzerliği ile ölçülmektedir. Tezde iki yeni başarım ölçüsü daha önerilmiş ve bağıntı adı verilen ölçünün daha kararlı olduğu değerlendirilmiştir. Olasılık modelleri tek başına kullanıldığında en iyi başarım, üçlü biçimbirim dil modeliyle elde edilmiştir. Modeller birleştirildiğinde ulaşılan en iyi bağıntı değeri ise yaklaşık 0,41 olmuştur.

Some Introduction to Peircean Semiotics and Pragmatism
by Tunç Güven Kaya (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 16th of October

Abstract Among many things, Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914) was a logician, scientist and philosopher. He is mostly known for his Semiotics and Pragmatism. According to him, "all thinking is conducted in signs" and Semiotics is the scientific study of the signs and their relations. Pragmatism, on the other hand, is a certain subject under the general theory of Semiotics. In this talk, we will very briefly introduce these concepts and try to connect them to the contemporary debates of Cognitive Science.

Modeling semantics: Vector representation, classical composition and beyond
by Fırat Öter (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 16th of October

Abstract Language and vision are two complementary modalities that employ deixis in communication. Verbal deictic expressions are necessarily accompanied by other modalities, such as pointing by gestures or pointing by gaze. The presence of multiple modalities facilitates disambiguating spatial reference to objects in the environment. We report an experimental study that investigated the deictic function of gaze in avatar agents. For this, we designed a virtual reality (VR) environment, which provided a joint attention setting between human participants and avatars. The participants responded to a set of questions that involved explicit or implicit referring expressions about the spatial locations of objects on a table, while their eye movements were recorded. The explicit statement of referring expressions, such as “what is the object at the left bottom?” revealed different patterns in terms of accuracy, response times and gaze allocation of the participants, compared to the implicit statements of referring expressions, i.e. “what is the object there?” that was accompanied by deictic gaze. The findings also showed that the avatar morphology might have a significant influence on the results. Overall, our findings show that the study of deictic gaze in virtual reality environments has the potential to expand our knowledge about mechanisms that underlie human spatial cognitive abilities as well as our knowledge about the interaction between humans and agents in VR.

Human Agent Interaction in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Investigation of Deictic Gaze in a Joint Attention Setting
by Dr. Cengiz Acartürk (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 9th of October

The Relation between Time and Meaning
by Giray Songül (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 2nd of October

Abstract There are at least two strong opinions in computational theories of mind arguing whether the syntax suffices to produce semantics. In this talk, using intuitions from recently developed artificial neural network models, the problem of exactly where semantics are formed in a syntactic system such as a brain will be discussed. The main argument of the talk, that will start about computation and go through philosophy, is that the semantic value can only be formed on the presence of time using nonlinear activation functions and its main purpose is to create time efficiency for its possessor. Perception of time greatly affects the perception of semantic value. If there is no time, there is no meaning at all.

Academic Year (2018-2019)

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Spring Semester

Open Science and Replicability
by Mine Mısırlısoy (Psychology, METU)
on 15th of May

Abstract Science is about testing hypotheses, in an effort to create general rules from results that can be replicated later; and using those rules to make further testable predictions. Open science is the collective action of making science more accessible and more transparent for all; including both professionals and amateurs. The main goal of the so called Open Science Movement is to make science more robust and replicable. In this talk, I will talk about the recent Replication Crisis, focusing specifically on the problematic practices that gave rise to this methods crisis in Psychological Science and Neuroscience. After a brief historical overview, I will talk about the benchmark events that gave rise to the replication crisis, and later the open science movement. I will put forward the Questionable Research Practices that, unfortunately, most scientists use either due to lack of knowledge and/or motivation, and give information on how to detect QRPs as users of knowledge and how to avoid them as creators of knowledge. Lastly, I will talk about ways to improve (psychological) science; such as, preregistration, registered replications, open methods, and open data.

Dopaminergic modulation of cross-modal attention in Drosophila
by Özlem Çevik (Psychology, TOBB Uni.)
on 8th of May

Abstract Translational models of attention and its disorders have been debated on the grounds that non-human animals cannot be fully validated as models of higher order cognitive abilities or disabilities of humans. Nonetheless, in recent years, there has been a new research trend to study attention and its disorders in animals with simpler brains, including fish and insects. Grounded on mounting evidence for the homology of molecular mechanisms as well as the similarity of underlying neural circuit principles, this new approach defines attention on the basis of its functional properties. Although researchers have long depicted elaborate experimental models of gain modulation in the peripheral nervous system of insects, they had a concessive reluctance to present peripheral gain modulation as a model of centrally-gated vertebrate attention. Behavioral tests of insect attention that have so far been used mainly depend on selective responding to a subset of stimuli or stimulus properties that impact the same sensory modality. We developed a behavioural test that involves competition between different sensory modalities each of which is associated with a different response system, such that behavioural choice potentially engages the activity of central neuropils involved in cross-modal stimulus association and/or action selection.

Speed Estimation as a Multistage and a Multisensory Process
by Hulusi Kafalıgönul (UMRAM, Bilkent Uni.)
on 24th of April

Abstract A growing body of evidence shows that the information provided by other modalities can affect visual motion perception. For instance, it is well known that the timing of brief static sounds alters different aspects of visual motion such as speed estimation. Yet, little is known about the principles and cortical processes underlying these effects of auditory timing. In this seminar talk, I will mainly talk about our progress in understanding the neural substrates involved in such multisensory nature of motion and speed estimation. In particular, I will present our recent findings on an audiovisual motion paradigm combined with a speed discrimination task. At the final part, I will discuss these findings from a broader perspective and provide their specific implications for audiovisual temporal processing and multisensory integration.

Catastrophic Risk Modeling and its Pricing in Insurance
by Sevtap Kestel (Actuarial Sciences, METU)
on 17th of April

Abstract Increasing prevalence of natural catastrophes due to population growth and global climate change propelled the insurance market to create sophisticated models and financial devices to offer protection against calamitous events such hurricanes, droughts, landslides, earthquakes and others. Uncertainty in the occurrence of these events and the financial losses that they may cause requires quantification of the risk and its financial impact. It is crucial to understand how catastrophe models are developed with repect to their underlying factors. Focused on earthquake, the techniques which enables us to measure the risk and its pricing in insurance and reinsurance markets are presented with examples.

The truth is not always that easy to remember: The effects of generating lies on memory predictions and actual memory performance
by Miri Besken (Psychology, Bilkent Uni.)
on 10th of April

Abstract Generating lies takes a longer time, requires more effort and is frequently considered to be less fluent, as compared to telling the truth. Clearly, more effortful and less fluent tasks typically increase memory performance and sometimes decrease memory predictions, but this claim has not been investigated within the realm of lie generation paradigms. In this talk, I will discuss the effects of generating lies on memory predictions and actual memory performance through three separate lie-generation manipulations. These manipulations involve lying about general knowledge questions, lying about personal semantic information and lying about episodic incidents. This line of research reveals that generating lies also increases actual memory performance and decreases one’s memory predictions about those items, just like other effortful and disfluent manipulations. However, the type of task used, the level of motivation to lie and the type of memory test used may also moderate the effects of lying on both memory predictions and actual memory performance.

Modeling Hereditary and Behavioral Patterns of Facial Expressions
by Hamdi Dibeklioğlu (Computer Engineering, Bilkent Uni.)
on 3rd of April

I feel cared for therefore I am well: The influence of close relationships on health and happiness
by Emre Selçuk (Psychology, METU)
on 20th of March

Abstract It has long been demonstrated that social relationships, especially those of attachment and mating variety, affects health and well-being. But a key question remains: How? Recent work in our lab aims to address this question using multiple methods including experimental, longitudinal, observational, and daily experience approaches and focusing on processes at multiple levels of analysis ranging from behavior to affect to physiology. The present talk will showcase studies from this research program documenting how partner responsiveness—the extent to which individuals believe that their partner cares for, understands, and appreciates them—is linked to mechanisms leading to health and well-being in the long run. I will discuss evidence that partner responsiveness buffers against stress reactivity, moderates the extent to which individuals benefit from social support, promotes health behaviors, and (possibly) alters long-term functioning of stress regulation systems, all of which influence later physical health and psychological well-being. Altogether the findings offer a window into the mechanisms of how relationships get to affect personal well-being.

Anlam-Biçim Eşleme Problemi Açısından Türkçede Çok Sözcüklü İfadeler
by Özkan Aslan (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 13th of March

Abstract Çok Sözcüklü İfadelerin (ÇSİ) tanınması problemi, hem Varlık İsmi Tanıma, hem de mecazi kullanım tanıma problemlerinden farklıdır. Doğal Dil İşleme Alanında ÇSİ'lerle ilgili genel anlayış, bunların işleme sırasında ayrıştırma yapmadan kalıp halinde alınması gereken ifadeler olduklarıdır. Ancak ÇSİ'ler özel deyim olarak çok farklı üretkenlikte ve sözdizimsel karmaşıklıkta karşımıza çıkabilmektedir. Biz ÇSİ-deyimlerin, aslında yakından bakıldığında istisnai değil bileşimsel ayrıştırmanın özel kategorilerle yapılmış hali olduklarını iddia ediyoruz. Bunu, grameri sözcük bilgisine indirgeyen kuramlarla modellediğimizde, uzun varlık isimlerinden ve mecazdan farklı kullanımlarının da öğrenilebilir olduğunu düşünmekteyiz. Bu bağlamda Combinatory Categorial Grammar (CCG) kuramını ve CCG modelleme, gramer öğrenme ve ayrıştırma yazılımlarını kullanıyoruz.

Academic Writing: An Overview
by Deniz Saydam & Esin Savul (Academic Writing Center, METU)
on 6th of March

Abstract This presentation aims to give an overview of the basic structure of academic writing, the ways to avoid plagiarism, and the citation methods (quoting, paraphrasing and summarizing) and to make some general suggestions on academic writing.

Expanding Existing Wordnets to New Languages
by Gönenç Ercan (Informatics, Hacettepe Uni.)
on 27th of February

Abstract Wordnet is a resource providing lexical knowledge in combination with a network of word meanings and their relationships. Word senses are organized using relationship types motivated by early psycholinguistic studies. Wordnet as a natural language resource accommodates a large body of research, yet it is still not available for many languages. Many projects have been and are still being proposed to build Wordnets for different languages. Even a translation based approach is reported to be an arduous work requiring experts to spend days on the task. As more resources including computational power became available, automated Wordnet construction methods emerged. While most methods combine several resources to translate Princeton Wordnet to a target language, we hypothesize that when words and their translations are observed for a large number of languages, it is possible to construct Wordnets for all the languages in the translation graph without requiring any additional resource. In this talk, we will discuss our work on building a multilingual Wordnet and the built resource which includes Wordnets for more than 40 languages.

Basic Tenets of Cognitive Science
by Ceyhan Temürcü (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 20th of February

Abstract N/A

Fall Semester

Type of expression and type of reference in a layered DRT
by Ceyhan Temürcü (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 4th of January

Abstract In this talk I will describe A-DRT, which is a multi-layered DRT and use it (i) to distinguish type of reference (explicit vs. implicit reference) from type of expression (presupposition vs. new information) (ii) to evaluate approaches that identify semantics with truth-conditional interpretation, and (iii) contribute to our understanding of presupposition and inference.

Multi-word expressions, meaning, and compositionality
by Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 21st of December

Abstract Multi-word expressions, verb-particle constructions, idiomatically combining phrases, and phrasal idioms have something in common: not all of their elements contribute to the argument structure of the predicate implicated by the expression. Radically lexicalized theories of grammar that avoid string-, term-, logical form-, and tree-writing, and categorial grammars that avoid wrap operation, make predictions about the categories involved in verb-particles and phrasal idioms. They may require singleton types, which can only substitute for one value, not just for one kind of value. These types are asymmetric: they can be arguments only. They also narrowly constrain the kind of semantic value that can correspond to such syntactic categories. Idiomatically combining phrases do not subcategorize for singleton types, and they exploit another locally computable and compositional property of a correspondence, that every syntactic expression can project its head word. Such MWEs can be seen as empirically realized categorial possibilities rather than lacuna in a theory of lexicalizable syntactic categories.

Lexical Inference in Turkish Emphatic Reduplication
by Özkan Kılıç (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 7th of December

Abstract Turkish Emphatic Reduplication (TER) occurs in adjectives and adverbs to accentuate their meanings (e.g., beyaz --> bembeyaz). TER is viewed as a purely phonological operation, and often used as an example in Optimality Theory and Morphological Doubling Theory. Despite the theory and the phonological rules for the selection of linker type in TER, variations do occur. For example, ci-r-il-ciplak, ci-s-ciplak, ci-r-ciplak, ci-p-ciplak and ci-m-ciplak will show up in web searches. In this study, 42 university students are asked to reduplicate 19 adjectives, 19 nouns, 19 verbs and 19 pseudowords of the from CVCCVC. Their answers, eye-tracking data and reaction times are analyzed. The results indicate that there is a lexical interference in TER.

Visual perception of actions: An interdisciplinary work between cognitive neuroscience and social robotics
by Burcu Ayşen Ürgen (Psychology, Bilkent University)
on 23rd of November

Abstract Successfully recognizing the actions of others is of utmost importance for the survival of many species. For humans, action perception is considered to support important higher order social skills, such as communication, intention understanding and empathy, some of which may be uniquely human. Over the last two decades, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies in primates have identified a network of regions in occipito-temporal, parietal and premotor cortex that are associated with perception of actions, known as the Action Observation Network. Despite a growing body of literature, the functional properties of this network remain largely unknown. We take a multi-modal, interdisciplinary, and computational approach to characterize the functional properties of this network in humans. To this end, we 1) collaborated with a robotics lab to vary various aspects of actions including visual appearance and movement kinematics of the agents, 2) used a wide range of brain measurement modalities (fMRI and EEG) together with state-of-the-art analytical techniques including representational similarity analysis, computer vision, and clustering to investigate the neural processing while human subjects performed action perception tasks. While our findings improve our understanding of the Action Observation Network, the interdisciplinary work with robotics also allows us to address questions regarding human factors in artificial agent design in social robotics and human-robot interaction such as uncanny valley, which is concerned with what kind of agents we should design so that humans can easily accept them as social partners.

Introducing METU Language and Cognitive Development Lab
by Duygu Özge (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 16th of November

Abstract I will give an overview of some major research questions in the field of language/cognitive development and their significance for cognitive science, followed by a summary of research projects we run in our emerging METU Language and Cognitive Development Lab.

Object detection through search with a foveated visual system
by Emre Akbaş (Computer Engineering, METU)
on 2nd of November

Abstract In this talk, I will present a foveated object detector (FOD) as a biologically-inspired alternative to the sliding window (SW) approach which is the dominant method of search in computer vision object detection. Similar to the human visual system, the FOD has higher resolution at the fovea and lower resolution at the visual periphery. Consequently, more computational resources are allocated at the fovea and relatively fewer at the periphery. The FOD processes the entire scene, uses retino-specific object detection classifiers to guide eye movements, aligns its fovea with regions of interest in the input image and integrates observations across multiple fixations. Our approach combines object detectors from computer vision with a recent model of peripheral pooling regions found at the V1 layer of the human visual system. We assessed various eye movement strategies on the PASCAL VOC 2007 dataset and show that the FOD performs on par with the SW detector while bringing significant computational cost savings.

Perspectives on the processing debate in reading
by Cengiz Acartürk (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 19th of October

Abstract Reading has been subject to intermittent research periods since the 1920s. Several computations models have been proposed since past decade, which have resulted in an intense debate on the interaction between oculomotor processes, lexical access and visual attention. From the perspective of general visual cognition, reading provides a prolific test bed -compared to object perception- due to its relatively systematic structure on the stimuli side. On the other hand, there is no consensus on the processes that guide reading recently. This talk will present the experience of the Reading Research Group in the Cognitive Science Program on reading in Turkish, since the past four years. I will present an instance of how theoretical frameworks drive data collection and how they lead to novel experimental paradigms through a set of examples in the reading debate.

Discourse annotation: A multi-lingual approach
by Deniz Zeyrek (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 12th of October

Abstract Linguistic annotation means adding informative information to texts and annotated texts are ultimately inputs to language technology applications. Linguistic annotation of language resources has become a science, encompassing methods of annotation for the design of the corpus, annotation creation, physical format considerations, evaluation, etc. Discourse is a unit above the sentence level and can be analyzed in terms of several kinds of patterning including but not limited to discourse relations. Discourse relations are a level in discourse associated with the semantic relations (contrast, condition, expansion, etc.) that hold among text segments (clauses or groups of clauses). After introducing the basic concepts of linguistic annotation, I will talk about a recent initiative on annotating the transcripts of TED talks that involve several languages (Turkish, English, Portuguese, German and Russian). Our initiative involves annotating discourse relations across texts. I will explain the annotation procedure and describe the corpus along with implications on our understanding of discourse.

Academic Year 2017-2018
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Spring Semester

Quantum Computers
by Sadi Turgut (Physics, METU)
on 8th of June

Abstract N/A

Bodily and Evolutionary Origins of Numerical Cognition: Why You Can Count on Your Fingers to Do Math
by Fırat Soylu (Educational Psychology/Neuroscience, Uni. of Alabama)
on 30th of May

Abstract Even though mathematics is considered one of the most abstract domains of human cognition, recent work on embodiment of mathematics has shown that we make sense of mathematical concepts by using insights and skills acquired through bodily activity. Fingers play a significant role in many of these bodily interactions. Paralleling their behavioral importance, fingers are disproportionately represented in the somatosensory and motor cortices in the human brain, and the finger sensorimotor system is highly integrated with other modalities, in particular the visual system. Finger-based interactions provide the preliminary access to foundational mathematical constructs, such as one-to-one correspondence and whole-part relations in early development. Furthermore, children across cultures use their fingers to count and do simple arithmetic. In this lecture I will talk about the neural, bodily, and evolutionary foundations of numerical cognition and present results from some behavioral, fMRI & EEG experiments conducted in our lab focusing on the role our hands and fingers play in our numerical abilities. We delve into issues such as how the early multimodal (tactile, motor, visuospatial) experiences with fingers might be the gateway for later numerical skills, and how finger sense ability, finger counting habits, and numerical abilities are associated at the behavioral and neural levels.

Gaze in Autism Spectrum Disorder
by Öykü Mançe Çalışır (Brain Research Center, Ankara Uni.)
on 18th of May

Abstract N/A

Structural prediction and reference resolution using a Context-Integrating Dependency Parser
by Özge Alaçam (Informatics, Uni. of Hamburg)
on 4th of May

Abstract Human situated language processing involves the interaction of linguistic and visual processing and this cross-modal integration helps to resolve ambiguities, predict what will be revealed next in an unfolding sentence or even anticipate the gaps in the sentences i.e. when the environment is noisy. Those processes allow us to have more accurate and fluent conversations. In contrast, state-of-the-art NLP algorithms are still far away from that accuracy when it comes to challenging linguistic or visual situations. In our research group, we focuses on studying underlying mechanisms of language processing of incrementally revealed utterances with accompanying visual scenes, with the aim of using the empirical insights to develop a cross-modal and incremental parser which can be implemented e.g. on a service robot. In this talk, I would like to talk about how we tackle the problem of compensating the verbal channel by additional information. This capability for multi-modal integration can be a very specific yet crucial feature in resolving references and/or performing commands for i.e. a helper robot that aids people in their daily activities.

Invisible Danger: What is behind the privileged access of threat stimuli to visual awareness?
by Nuno Gomes (William James Center for Research, ISPA Instituto Universitário)
on 27th of April

Abstract Evolution has equipped humans with a readiness to associate fear with situations that threatened the survival of their ancestors (e.g., hostile conspecifics or potentially deadly predators). Snakes are thought as a prime example of that type of threat stimuli due to the evolutionary pressure that they exerted in primates. In fact, they are processed preferentially, even in the absence of visual awareness, which results in a faster attentional grabbing and a privileged access to visual awareness. This privileged processing seems to be associated with a subcortical superior colliculus - pulvinar pathway to the amygdala, bypassing the visual cortex. However, specifically in the case of the privileged access to visual awareness, the importance of these subcortical mechanisms has been debated in studies using socially threat stimuli (e.g., fearful or angry faces), referring the importance of visual cortical areas in threat processing. Recent data - obtained using Continuous Flash Suppression and manipulating spatial frequency information – have shed some light on this debate, suggesting that the processing of socially (e.g., fearful faces) and biologically (e.g., snakes) threat stimuli could rely on different neuronal pathways. Notably, this comparison remains unexplored. Considering the role of attention in unware threat stimuli processing, and its relation with the privileged access to visual awareness, may be the first step to disentangle the referred debate.

Look right: Visual attention orienting as a function of script direction
by Rita Duarte Mendonça (William James Center for Research, ISPA Instituto Universitário)
on 20th of April

Abstract Culturally established reading and writing habits have been found to drive visual attention asymmetrically. Movement is generally conceived of as evolving laterally in the writing direction that one is socialized into. In the case of European languages, this is a left-to-right bias. These spatial routines create expectations about how action unfolds and have an impact on how visual space is navigated. The orientation of visual attention has been examined with variations of Posner-like cueing tasks. It is well-established that when cue indication and target location are consistent target detection, performance is enhanced. It is impaired when cue indication and target location are inconsistent. While this pattern may hold for most studies, culturally established reading and writing habits are likely to exercise an additional unidirectional influence on detection performance, a factor that has been overlooked. We propose that the rightward attentional bias prompted by the culturally anchored direction of movement should give rise to differences both in detection latencies and gaze movements across left and right visual fields. In two experiments, we found that the robust congruency effect typically observed in cueing tasks is amplified when a visual cue is aligned with habitualized left-to-right scanning habits (i.e., right-facing face). Study 1 relied on response times (RT) for correct detection and error rates in an examination that used three facial orientations as attention directing cues and revealed a rightward spatial bias in target detection. Study 2 introduced an objective measure, namely eye movements, to examine the underlying orientation of attention driving these detection decisions. Across both studies and three response intervals, search times were shown to shorter when cue-target pairs converged, namely right facing facial prime and target at the right-hand location compared to cue-target pairs converging at the left side. Eye movement data obtained in the second study confirmed that face position drove initial gaze movement and that left and front facing primes resulted in virtually equal exploration patterns. We speculate that because front faces do not prime any directionality, they induced the habitualized left-right attentional scanning as did left facing primes. Interestingly, first saccade within trial was faster to the visual field opposite to the direction implied by the prime. Overall saccadic and fixation behavior was to the right, that is, a higher number of saccades and fixations was made to the right following a right facing prime and a target embedded on the right target set. These findings suggest that asymmetries in visual attention and detection are highly dependent on the rightward spatial bias driven by the habitualized reading and writing direction.

When you eat from the cake, is it all gone? Children’s acquisition of quantity expressions
by Duygu Özge (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 13th of April

Abstract How children learn number words – or quantity expressions in general – occupies a special place in developmental cognitive science. Given that quantity expressions denote properties of sets rather than properties of individuals, their acquisition requires an integration of perceptual and cognitive systems additional to the ones employed during the acquisition of non-quantificational vocabulary (e.g., concrete terms). In other words, the general principles of word learning would not be sufficient on their own to secure the acquisition of quantity expressions. In this talk, I will review what we know about the cognitive prerequisites underlying our knowledge of number terms and the pattern of development in this domain. I will then talk about the acquisition of quantifier terms (e.g., all, most, some, none) and summarize the findings of our collaborative project investigating the cross-linguistic factors influencing the acquisition of quantifiers as part of COST Action A33 & XPrag-UK (2009-2011). Finally, to illustrate what kind of language-specific factors might also be at work in this process, I will present our ongoing study with four-year-olds on the use of Turkish case morphology during the interpretation of part-whole relations.

Deep Learning: how deep is it and how much it learns?
by Didem Gökçay (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 30th of March

Abstract With the help of Hinton and increasing computing power brought by clusters and densely connected architectures, wiring large layers of multi-layered perceptrons became possible, giving way to human-like performance in applications of artificial neural networks. Deep learning, the name given to such networks, have been controversial though. These networks neither help humans to understand the ‘deep’ foundations of thought nor produce artificial ‘learning’ systems, more so than genetic algorithms teaching us about genetics (or simulated annealing method teaching us about materials, or Boltzmann machines teaching us about mechanical aspects). In this talk: (i) the faint relationship between deep learning and actual multi-layered neural networks that originate from the human brain will be revealed along with the underlying foundation, Hebbian learning, and its counterpart in synaptic plasticity; (ii)similar operational principles in genetic algorithms and simulated annealing will be revealed, to emphasize optimization strategies inspired by nature; (iii) criticisms against ‘deep’ and machine ‘learning’ systems will be brought up based on a few publications; (iv) whether neuroscience can profit from current deep learning systems will be discussed in the light of the protests against Markram and the European Union Human Brain Project. The talk will end with wishful thinking avenues to argue how deep learning systems might aid in understanding plasticity in the brain either at the synaptic or cortical level.

‘Nine Ways To Wake Up’ An Approach to Design for Interaction and User Experience
by Bahar Şener Pedgley (Industrial Design, METU)
on 23rd of March

Abstract The presentation will briefly report on the foundations and research findings of an educational approach to designing for (or by) ‘meaningful interaction’, in which user-product interaction conceived through everyday adjectives and phrases. A product design project (bedside alarm clock) is used as a vehicle for exploring meaning-based design for interaction teaching and learning. Low-cost AR technologies are also integrated into this project to enable design students to enhance their 2D presentation boards and 3D physical mock-ups with an additional layer of digital information.

Infant habituation and adult repetition attenuation - A case study for the integration challenge in cognitive science
by Annette Hohenberger (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 16th of March

Abstract Studying infants’ early perceptual and cognitive abilities using looking paradigms in combination with habituation have radically changed research on infant cognition during the last 60 years (Aslin, 2007). First being used as a research aim in its own right, habituation soon became the main methodological tool for testing infants’ discrimination abilities. However, the impact of this combined methodology has even further ramifications into cognitive science. A similar processes as observed in infants’ looking behavior – habituation – also occurs in adults – repetition attenuation, as revealed in fMRI studies. What they have in common is that they “reflect increased processing of new information.” (Turk-Browne, et al., 2008, p. 4). In this talk I will follow the reasoning of Turk-Browne et al. (2008) that there exists a common underlying mechanism of these two forms of habituation. Moreover, I will support their claim with evidence from our own studies on infant listening/looking behavior in the context of early language acquisition (Hohenberger et al., 2017). In particular I will (try to) disentangle under which circumstances a familiarity preference or a novelty preference arises. In a broader cognitive science perspective, the present topic presents a case study for what Bermúdez (2014) calls the “integration challenge”.

Neonatal Imitation in Context
by Nazım Keven (Philosophy, Bilkent Uni.)
on 9th of March

Abstract Over 35 years ago, Meltzoff and Moore (1977) published their famous article ‘Imitation of facial and manual gestures by human neonates’. Their central conclusion, that neonates can imitate, was and continues to be controversial. Here we focus on an often neglected aspect of this debate, namely on neonatal spontaneous behaviors themselves. We present a case study of a paradigmatic orofacial ‘gesture’, namely tongue protrusion and retraction (TP/R). Against the background of new research on mammalian aerodigestive development, we ask: How does the human aerodigestive system develop and what role does TP/R play in the neonate’s emerging system of aerodigestion? We show that mammalian aerodigestion develops in two phases: (1) from the onset of isolated orofacial movements in utero to the post-natal mastery of suckling at 4 months after birth, and; (2) thereafter, from preparation to the mastery of mastication and deglutition of solid foods. Like other orofacial stereotypies, TP/R emerges in the first phase and vanishes prior to the second. Based upon recent advances in activity-driven early neural development, we suggest a sequence of three developmental events in which TP/R might participate: the acquisition of tongue control, the integration of the central pattern generator for TP/R with other aerodigestive CPGs, and the formation of connections within the cortical maps of S1 and M1. If correct, orofacial stereotypies are crucial to the maturation of aerodigestion in the neonatal period but also unlikely to co-occur with imitative behavior.

User research and effective communication of research findings
by Gülşen Töre Yargın (Industrial Design, METU)
on 2nd of March

Abstract In this seminar, Gülşen Töre Yargın will talk about user research projects conducted at METU/BİLTİR - UTEST Product Usability Unit and issues related to effective communication of user research findings to the design process based on her PhD journey.

Some Surprising Facts about the Mind
by Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 23rd of February

Abstract N/A

Fall Semester

Issues in the Semantics of Nominalization
by Umut Özge (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 5th of January

Abstract Introductory expositions of syntax(-semantics interface) usually start with a discussion of the parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs. It is remarkable that this pedagogical square-one of linguistic theory is also a fertile source for many recalcitrant puzzles in the field. To put it crudely, characterizing the difference between what is verbal and what is nominal is not a trivial task. Nominalization, the business of turning verb-like entities to noun-like entities as in 'refuse' to 'refusal' or 'John examined the papers' to 'John's examining the papers', sits at the center of the web of puzzles involving the very fundamental notions of linguistic theory. My primary aim in this talk is to raise interest in the semantics of various nominalization processes through an informal discussion of some data from Turkish, where nominalization interacts with argument structure, existence presuppositions, temporal reference, and event structure.

Neural Correlates of Decision Making Processes
by Murat Perit Çakır (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 29th of December

Abstract Existing work in decision making research has identified normative accounts to evaluate the decisions made by humans as well as specific limitations and heuristics shaping those decisions in the face of perceived risks and uncertainties. There is now a growing interest in cognitive science and neurosciences regarding the dynamical unfolding of the processes through which humans arrive at decisions. This talk will introduce some of the approaches employed in the field and provide an overview of some of the main findings regarding implicated brain networks, in relation to the empirical studies conducted with optical brain imaging technology at the COGS lab.

Silent Reading and Oral Reading in Turkish: An Investigation of Reading Modality and the Eye-Voice Span
by Ayşegül Özkan (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 22nd of December

Abstract Reading is a complex cognitive process which is an assembly of processes at different levels, from low-level visual perception to high-level discourse comprehension. Most of the research on reading heavily depend on eye movement data. Previous studies provide extensive evidence about the predictable influences of lexical and syntactic manipulations on eye movement measures in reading. (Warren, Reichle & Patson, 2011, Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby & Clifton Jr., 2012; Radach & Kennedy, 2013; Rayner, 1998.) In oral reading eyes move ahead of the voice. The eye-voice span (i.e., EVS) is the distance between the articulation and viewing of a word. The goal of this study is to investigate eye movement patterns in silent reading and oral reading in Turkish. It is work in progress. We conducted a within-subject experiment, which consisted of a silent reading block, and an oral reading block. The full target word set is designed according to lexical characteristics of words, i.e., word length and frequency. The relationship between reading modality, lexical characteristics of words and eye movement measures, and the relationship between lexical characteristics of words and EVS are investigated. Additionally, the relationship between the eye-voice span and eye movement measures is investigated indirectly through the relationship between lexical characteristics of a target word and the fixation duration at the beginning of the articulation of that target word. The preliminary results suggest that lexical characteristics of words and reading modality influence the eye movement measures, and characteristics of words influence EVS, as well. The relationship between lexical characteristics of target words and the fixation durations at the beginning of the articulation of them imply a relationship between EVS and eye movement measures.

Extending Discourse Annotation to Multiple Languages: TED-MDB
by Deniz Zeyrek (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 15th of December

Abstract Annotation (adding information to texts) has become a science, bringing together linguists, cognitive scientists and computational linguists to share knowledge, ask new questions, and develop software. Annotation can be done on all levels of language; in this talk I will only be concerned with discourse-level annotation and the potential gains from this endeavor. My focus will be on discourse relations (contract, condition, expansion, etc.) that hold between text segments, which are usually clauses or groups of clauses. After introducing the basic concepts of discourse and annotation, I will introduce a new initiative where we annotate the transcripts of TED talks involving English, Turkish and several other languages. The corpus is called TED-Multilingual Discourse Bank, or TED-MDB. This initiative has grown within Textlink, a European COST project, bringing together a group of researchers interested in discourse annotation. I will explain the annotation process of TED-MDB, describe the current stage of the research, as well as the research questions that arise during this effort.

KelimeDenVektörE: What Do Distributed Representations of Turkish Words Tell Us About Morphology?
by Özkan Kılıç (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 8th of December

Abstract Mikolov et al. (2013a, 2013b) proposed a novel model architecture based on an Artificial Neural Network for computing continuous vector representations of words from very large data sets. The architecture is based on a skip-gram model for learning the representations that can capture semantic word relationships. In this ongoing project, 600 million Turkish words are used to train a model similar to Mikolov et al.'s. Initial findings suggest that such distributed representations can guide learning morphology. The findings also support the continuum approach to 'inflection-derivation' distinction rather than the dichotomous approach.

Denial of Expectation in Turkish and in General: New Insights and Prospects for a Logical Treatment
by Ceyhan Temürcü (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 17th of November

Abstract Apparently, all human languages have strategies for blocking possible inferences from a preceding clause or discourse segment. This sense, which take part in the semantic ranges in Turkish *ama *or *fakat*, and of English *but*, has often been dubbed 'denial of expectation' (DE) and subsumed under the more general family of 'contrastive' senses. In this talk, which reflects our joint work with Prof. Deniz Zeyrek, I will propose a general logical specification for the DE sense, arguing that DE denies a possible inference afforded by a counter-actual knowledge state. I will then compare this proposal to that of Winter and Rimon (1994), which is based on Veltman's (1986) data logic, and that of Toosarvandani (2014), which recruits Kratzer's (1981, 1991) analysis of modality.

Plans, Actions, and Sentences
by Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 10th of November
[slides]

Abstract At the level of sentences, predicates bear thematic relations to their arguments, such as agent, patient, beneficiary. They show diversity in argument-taking, from intransitives to ditransitives. At the level of discourse we do not see such diversity, or sensitivity to thematic roles. Recursion is also one observable difference between discourse and sentence structure. The same differences appear to hold between plans, which are functions from states to states, and scripts, which are participant-taking functions with some affinity to thematic structure. Scripts are thematic-role sensitive whereas plans need not be. We summarise some thinking about linking planning and language, both cognitively, and evolutionarily.

Interaction between Language and Vision: Findings from Multimodal Comprehension Studies
by Cengiz Acartürk (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 3rd of November

Abstract The study of multimodal comprehension involves the investigation of linguistic and non-linguistic means of communication. The production of specific types of utterances, such as reference and deixis provide an appropriate testbed to study multimodal conceptualization of entities in the visual world. This talk will present findings in deictic cross-referencing in multimodal environments under various communication modalities.

Cognitive Science meets Social Science: Joint Action Paradigms for Adults and Children
by Annette Hohenberger (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 27th of October
[slides]

Abstract Within the last decades, cognitive science has seen a surge in joint (dual- and multiple-agent) task paradigms extending the classical individual paradigms. This development leads to an overlap with social science and promises some fruitful interdisciplinary integration across the two fields. On this path, similar yet different paradigms such as “social facilitation” and “joint action” need to be distinguished, though. In this talk I want to present some recent showcase studies conducted by our Cogs students which highlight the benefits of various joint paradigms as well as their challenges, studying adults and children: the role of joint action in time perception (Kerem Alp Usal, 2016); co-representation of a partner’s task in children (Esra Katircioglu Terzi, 2017); joint change-detection (Mustafa Akkuscu, 2017); and joint tool-making in children (Gökhan Gönül, ongoing). I will lay particular emphasis on the particular task structure used to study joint action, the possible mechanism(s) underlying it and the differential role of collaboration vs competition. The talk will conclude with an outlook on future research along the lines of this exciting new interdisciplinary research agenda.

Characterization of the Purkinje Cell to Nuclear Cell Connections in Mice Cerebellum
by Orkan Özcan (Neuroscience, CNRS)
on 20th of October
[slides TBA]

Abstract The cerebellum integrates motor commands with somatosensory, vestibular, visual and auditory information for motor learning and coordination functions. The final step of this integration is done in the deep cerebellar nuclei (DCN) that process inputs from Purkinje cells (PC) and the two main inputs of the cerebellum: mossy and climbing fibers. We investigated the properties of PC connections from the lobule IV/V of the cerebellar cortex to the different DCN cell types in the medial nuclei using optogenetic stimulation in L7-ChR2 mice combined with in vivo multi electrode extracellular recordings. We identified two groups of DCN cells with significant differences in their action potential waveforms and firing rates which matched with the properties of GABAergic and non-GABAergic cells discriminated in vitro. The discharge of the DCN cells was correlated to the local field potentials and we found that DCN cells were phase locked to oscillations in the beta, gamma and high frequency bands. Although optogenetic stimulation of PCs resulted in the inhibition of the two groups of DCN cells (rate coding), spike times were controlled only for non-GABAergic cells. Moreover, local inhibition onto non-GABAergic cells was not observed in our in vivo experiments. Our results suggest that synchronized PC inputs drive the output of cerebellum by temporally controlling only non-GABAergic cells. Also, the internal DCN circuitry supports this phenomenon since GABAergic cells are not temporally controlled and the local inhibition they provide does not alter the time-locked output of the DCN.

Academic Year 2016-2017
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Spring Semester

Dealing with Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) Problem in Natural Language Processing
by Burcu Can (Computer Engineering, Hacettepe University)
on 26th of May
[slides]

Abstract Out-of-Vocabulary (OOV) problem is inevitable in many natural language processing applications. Morphology is one of the major factors that poses the OOV problem by leading to a large number of different word forms. The problem is even more severe in agglutinative languages such as Turkish. We deal with OOV problem with morphological segmentation that is the task of splitting words into their smallest units called morphemes. For example, the word *Türkçeleştiremediklerimizden *is split as *Türk+çe+leş+tir+e+me+dik+ler+imiz+den. *We also tackle the OOV problem in part-of-speech tagging (PoS tagging) by a joint task that involves stemming. Thus, stems are tagged rather than words in order to reduce the sparsity in the corpus.

A Tractarian Method for Computational Ontology
by Aziz F. Zambak (Philosophy, METU)
on 12th of May
[slides]

Abstract Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written by Ludwig Wittgenstein, is one of the most influential book in the history of philosophy. In my presentation, I will describe the general metaphysical principles of Tractatus and discuss how can we apply these principles to Knowledge Representation and Formal Ontologies.

Adaptive Control of Behaviour: Complex Supervision or Simple Retrieval?
by Nart Bedin Atalay (Psychology, TOBB University of Economics and Technology)
on 5th of May

Abstract Cognitive control is the ability to adjust behaviour to meet task demands under a changing context. Incoming information is suppressed or processed in light of the current goal and the environment. There is an ongoing debate on whether the adaptive control of behaviour is governed by a supervisory mechanism or by retrieval of past events. I will describe our studies and discuss implications to resolving this debate.

Who is to blame when a cat fears a dog?: Implicit Causality Biases in Turkish Psych-Verbs
by Duygu Özge (Foreign Language Education, METU)
on 21st of April
[slides]

Abstract Different verb types have different causality biases. In action verbs, for instance, it is always the subject who is responsible for the action. For the sentence 'John broke the vase’, the subject (John) is the causer. However, the causality information is not as straightforward – but it is implicit – for some event types. Implicit causality refers to the tendency to assign a specific participant of the event as the cause of the resulting action, situation, or emotion. I focus on the implicit causality biases for Turkish psychological verbs (psych-verbs) in this talk. Psych-verbs (e.g., frighten, fear, love) tend to reflect irregular intuitions about the cause of the triggered emotion. For a sentence like ‘The cat frightens the dog’, people tend to hold the subject (cat) responsible for the feeling whereas the cause is not as clear in sentences like ‘The cat fears the dog’. This irregularity about which participant receives the causal role raises some interesting issues concerning (i) the widely held assumption that subjects are more prominent, (ii) the ranking of event participants as possible antecedents of ambiguous anaphors, and (iii) the nature of syntax-semantics mapping during language acquisition. I will discuss these issues in light of our recent pronoun resolution study.

Early Symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorders and Eye Tracking Technology
by Selda Özdemir (Special Education, Gazi University)
on 14th of April

Abstract Autism spectrum disorders (ASD) is a developmental disorder that appears in the first three years of life and affects social emotional development and social communication skills of children. Children with ASD often have difficulty in making eye contact, initiating social interactions, maintaining conversations, displaying interactive social play behaviors, understanding others’ intentions and emotions, adjusting to transitions, and displaying verbal and nonverbal social interaction behaviors. Due to these social communication problems, children with the disorder appear to be isolated and obvious to the social world and such problems deteriorate these children’s parent-child interactions, peer relations and social adjustment throughout childhood and adulthood.

Implementation of early intervention programs that are designed to address social communication problems of children with ASD are very important in changing the tragic development of the disorder. In order to begin early intervention efforts as soon as possible, assessment of ASD risks in the first three years of life is crucial. This lecture will begin with a review of early symptoms of ASD and will continue by discussing a research project on examining eye tracking patterns of children with ASD supported by SCRTC-EU(COST). We believe that eye tracking technology now make it possible to improve the precision of existing assessments for ASD. Second, an early intervention program “Parent Mediated Joint Attention Early Intervention Program” will be introduced in the lecture. An important aspect of this program is that it promotes joint attention skills of young children with ASD and/or high risk for ASD and provide them with necessary early developmental experiences through enriched social exchanges. We think that this improvement is necessary to address early developmental and learning needs of children with ASD.

Öğrenmede Elektronik Okuma: Çok-katmanlı Etkileşim ve Öğretimsel İleti Tasarımı
by Serkan Şendağ (Computer and Teaching Technologies, Mersin University)
on 8th of April
Talk in Turkish
[slides]

Abstract Öğrenmek için okuma, temelinde bir materyalden öğrenme etkinliğidir. Bu tür etkinliklerin özellikle bir hedef kitlesi vardır. Bu hedef kitlenin farklı beceri, bilişsel, duyuşsal ve hazırbulunuşluk düzeyleri vardır. Bunlara okuyucuların farklı sosyo-kültürel çevrede yaşamasının eklenmesiyle okuyucularda farklı beklentilerin oluşması doğal bir hal almaktadır. Bu durumda hedef kitlenin gereksinimlerini karşılarken gerekli içeriği etkili bir şekilde aktarmak bir durumdan diğerine değişen bağlamsal bir problem çözme süreci haline gelmektedir. Oysa ders, çalışma ve alıştırma kitapları başta olmak üzere öğretimsel içerikler standart bir anlayışa göre sunulmaktadır. Bu bağlamda elektronik ortamda sunulan öğrenme içerikleri zengin bir etkileşim ortamı sağlayarak okuma içeriğinin bireyselleştirilmesine olanak tanıma potansiyeline sahiptir. Güncel bilişim teknolojileri araçları yazılı metnin yanı sıra, ses, durağan resim, hareketli görüntü, iki ve üç boyutlu animasyonlar, sanal ve artırılmış gerçeklik uygulamaları ile çok katmanlı (multimodal) etkileşime olanak tanıyan bir öğrenme çevresi sunmaktadır. Böyle bir öğrenme çevresinden gerektiği gibi yararlanabilmek için öğretimsel tasarımın etkili bir şekilde yapılması gerekmektedir. Bu nedenle elektronik ortamda sunulan öğretimsel içeriğin tasarım özellikleri ile bu konudaki araştırma olanakları ve disiplinler arası çalışmanın önemi üzerinde durmak bu çalışmanın temel amacını oluşturmaktadır.

Tracking Eye Movements to Investigate Covert Processes in Language Comprehension
by Mustafa Seçkin (Neurology, İstanbul University)
on 31st of March

Abstract Progressive degeneration of language network in Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders may disrupt cognitive processes long before language impairment can be detected by clinicians. Detecting early impairment of language functions, in particular comprehension deficits, requires investigating covert processes responsible for linking words and sentences to their mental representations. However, traditional cognitive tests have low sensitivity for the diagnosis of pre-symptomatic impairment in language functions. Recently, we developed a new method where eye movements have been used to detect the impairment in linking written (or spoken) words to meaningful mental representations during a word-object matching paradigm. Additionally, we successfully integrated novel sentence-completion paradigms with eye tracking experiments to study the underlying mechanisms of sentence processing in language network. The preliminary findings suggest that tracking eye movements can also be used to reveal how language network decodes grammatical relations between the verb and its arguments and this process can be disrupted before overt grammatical errors can be observed in patients with neurodegenerative aphasia.

Symbol Emergence in Robots
by Emre Uğur (Computer Engineering, Boğaziçi University)
on 24th of March

Abstract In this talk, I will discuss whether, how and why symbols should emerge in intelligent systems such as humans and robots. For this, I introduce a learning framework that enables manipulator robots (with 7 dof. arms and multi-fingered hands) to progressively develop better and more abstract sensorimotor and cognitive skills through physical and social interactions with the environment. I will describe how behavior primitives, affordance categories, prediction and imitation mechanisms, and finally high-level symbolic operators can emerge in the continuous sensorimotor space of the robots through learning from such interactions. After giving a partial answer to 'how' question this way, I would like to discuss the 'whether' and 'why' questions with the audience.

Counter-Expectational Sense in Turkish and in General: Some Critical Data and Prospects for a Formal Treatment in a Layered-DRT
by Ceyhan Temürcü & Deniz Zeyrek (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 17th of March

Abstract Apparently, all human languages have strategies for challenging possible inferences from a preceding clause or discourse segment. This sense, which take part in the semantic ranges in Turkish *ama *or *fakat*, and of English *but*, has often been dubbed 'counter-expectational' (CE) and subsumed under the more general family of 'contrastive' senses. I this talk we will (i) provide critical data that reveals some semantic and pragmatic ingredients of the CE sense, (ii) propose a descriptive specification for this sense and (iii) provide prospects for a formal treatment of CE in a multi-layered version of DRT, which distinguishes temporal, epistemic, volitional, and illocutionary layers. In a nutshell, we will argue that CE denies a possible inference afforded by a counter-actual knowledge state.

Data we will consider will include cases where a possible inference from the first conjunct is explicitly challenged by the second conjunct (1), where it is indirectly challenged by the second conjunct (2-3), where there is apparently no (syntactic or discursive) first conjunct (4), where the first and second conjuncts belong to different interlocutors (5), and where the second conjunct denies a content which is directly expressed (rather then implied) by the first conjunct (6-8):

(1) Ahmet kısa boylu ama iyi basketbol oynuyor.
(2) Zor bir iş ama bence bir dene.
(3) Hava soğuk ama (neyse ki) paltom var.
(4) Ama sen sigara içiyorsun!
(5) I1. Ahmet evde / I2. Ama öğlen onu okulda gördüm.
(6) Ahmet burada olabilir, ama olmayabilir de.
(7) Arabayı sana verirdim ama sarhoşsun.
(8) Ahmet burada olabilirdi ama değil.

The proposal will be briefly compared to that of Winter and Rimon (1994), which is based on Veltman's (1986) data logic, and that of Toosarvandani (2014), which recruits Kratzer's (1981, 1991) analysis of modality.

Machine Learning of the Mind
by Fatoş T. Yarman Vural (Computer Engineering, METU)
on 10th of March
[slides]

Abstract How does the information represented in the brain? We approach this question from the Artificial Intelligence perspective. Loosely speaking, we attempt to model the "Natural Intelligence" by using Artificial intelligence. We suggest a deep learning method to model the cognitive states of the brain, using functional magnetic resonance imaging data (fMRI). The suggested method assumes that the cognitive processes can be represented by a deep learning system, which is trained by the fMRI measurements.The most challenging problem of modeling such a learning system is the design of a model for the fMRI data, to extract the information about the underlying patterns of brain activity. In this study, we propose a new method called Mesh Learning, which learns the connectivity patterns of the brain. Then use these patterns to model and classify the fMRI data recorded during a set of cognitive tasks. The experimental results indicate that the suggested model has excellent performance compared to the state of the art statistical techniques.

Evolutionary Robotics and Swarm Robotics
by Ali Emre Turgut (Mechanical Engineering, METU)
on 3rd of March

Abstract Electronics and computers advanced considerably in the last two decades. As a consequence, we started to see more and more robots around us today than we see in the factories. Unmanned air vehicles and autonomous vacuum cleaners are two such examples. Main difference between these robots and the factory robots are that these robots have to tackle unstructured and unknown environments making it very challenging to design their controllers. There are different approaches to design the controllers. Evolutionary robotics is one such promising approach taking its inspiration from natural evolution. In the recent years, evolutionary algorithms have been applied successfully to different engineering problems including robotics. In this talk, I will make a brief introduction to evolutionary algorithms and evolutionary robotics. Then, I will briefly talk about swarm robotics and evolutionary swarm robotics field. The talk will end up with discussion about future directions.

Fall Semester

L2 Influence on L1 for Turkish-English Late Bilinguals
by Özkan Kılıç (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 6th of January

Abstract The potential effect of acquisition of the second language (L2) on the first (L1) is less well-understood. One might assume that the L1, once acquired, would be stable and resistant to change. However, accumulating evidence indicates that acquisition of an L2 can, in some respects, influence use of the L1. One way of thinking about where L2 influence on L1 might arise is based on the fact that linguistic knowledge must be accessed in memory in order to be used. If the lexicon is stored in declarative memory but morphosyntactic and phonological knowledge are stored in procedural memory, then lexical performance may be most susceptible to L2 influence because it will be most subject to standard memory parameters such as frequency of retrieval and use. By this line of reasoning, morphosyntax and phonology, which involve more automatized procedures, should be less vulnerable to L2 influence. In this colloquium, we will talk about L2 influence on L1 for Turkish-English late bilinguals in terms of: pronoun usage, verb framing and phonotactics.

What Good is a Formal Discourse Representation?
by Umut Özge (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 23rd of December

Abstract Two phenomena are critical in holding a natural language discourse together. One is "anaphora resolution" as in inferring that the pronoun `they' in (2) refers to a bunch of delegates reported to have arrived in (1).

(1) A few delegates arrived.
(2) They registered.

The other is presupposition. Take sentence (3)*:

(3) It seems to me that the moment has come that the bombing of German cities simply for the sake of increasing the terror, though under other pretexts, should be reviewed.

The speaker of (3) already takes it for granted the content in (4):

(4) The German cities are being bombed for the sake of increasing the terror.

For instance, if you are not happy with the content in (4), responding `No, it hasn't' or `No, not really' to (3) would not help; you rather have to say something like `Wait a minute, who says that the bombing is for the sake of increasing the terror'. In technical terms, (3) is said to presuppose (4), and presuppositions survive under manipulations like negating the sentence or putting it into a question form. I will discuss how these two phenomena can be modeled under a formal discourse model, resulting in a unified treatment of anaphora and presupposition as one and the same phenomenon. Then, I will review some data from Turkish noun phrases which pose some interesting challenges to the model, together with sketches of possible solutions.

*Winston Churchill to Arthur Harris, Commander-in-Chief of RAF’s Bomber Command in 1945. Reported in Blitz, Bombing and Total War, Channel 4, January 15, 2005.

The Abysmal Splendor of Cognitive Neuroscience
by Didem Gökçay (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 16th of December

Abstract In this talk, a brief history of cognitive neuroscience will be presented from 1980's and on. Localization efforts regarding association of mental functions with specific brain structures will be explained. Breakthroughs brought by fMRI methodology will be summarized. Some tools and features of this domain will be presented and the hype and failings regarding cognitive neuroscience will be illustrated. The talk will conclude with a critique of new funding directions.

Sensitivity to Vowel Harmony in the First Year of Life: Implications for Theories of (Phonological) Learning
by Annette Hohenberger (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 9th of December

Abstract Infants’ language perception abilities develop dramatically in their first year of life. Starting out as a universal listener they become (neurally) committed to their native language (Kuhl, 2014). With behavioral methods – preferential listening and habituation – we studied the development of vowel harmony longitudinally in monolingual Turkish infants from 6-10-months of age. Infants at both ages can discriminate harmonic from disharmonic versions of the same word. However, 6-month-olds show discrimination only when they have been habituated with the disharmonic version first (e.g., zeybek-tan) and then hear the harmonic version in the test (e.g., zeybek-ten) whereas 10-month-olds can discriminate the versions in either order, indicating a more generalized discrimination ability. In terms of preference we found a characteristic shift from familiarity to novelty: 6-months-old infants preferred listening to harmonic words whereas as 10-month-olds preferred listening to disharmonic words. This shift indicates that infants first acquire the regular (harmonic) phonological pattern and filter out the irregular (disharmonic) pattern. Once the regular (familiar) pattern has been firmly established – which happens roughly between 6 and 10 months of age – they discern and appreciate the deviant (unfamiliar, novel) pattern. Such shifts have been observed in other cognitive domains as well, e.g., in vision.

The claim that early sensitivity to vowel harmony is based on language-specific auditory experience during the first year of life is supported by the negative results of van Kampen et al. (2008) who could not find any listening preference of 6-month-old German infants to vowel-harmonic vs. –disharmonic words. However, Mintz et al. (under review) could show that English-acquiring infants are able to segment words based on vowel (dis-)harmony cues after a short familiarization phase of only 50 sec. Obviously, studies using different experimental methodologies – discrimination, preference, segmentation – tap different processing mechanisms in early language development. In my talk I will try to synthesize these various findings and try to reconcile them with theories of early (phonological) learning.

Negation and Its Logical Representation(s)
by Ceyhan Temürcü (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 2nd of December

Abstract In this talk I will try to show that negation in natural languages comes in many different types, which extend beyond the classical internal-external (or, narrow- vs wide-scope) dichotomy. I will argue that a multi-modal logical representation is necessary to capture different types of negation, in terms of content, temporal, epistemic and volitional levels.

Multilingual Discourse Annotation: Annotating TED Talks
by Deniz Zeyrek (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 25th of November

Abstract Discourse is a unit above the sentence level and can be analyzed in terms of several kinds of patterning including but not limited to discourse relations. Discourse relations are a level in discourse associated with the semantic relations (contrast, condition, expansion, etc.) that hold among text segments (clauses or groups of clauses). After introducing these basic concepts of discourse, I will talk about a recent initiative on annotating the transcripts of TED talks that involve several languages (Turkish, English, Portuguese, German and Russian). Annotation means adding informative information to texts and annotated texts are ultimately inputs to language technology applications. Our initiative involves annotating discourse relations across texts. I will explain the annotation procedure and describe the corpus along with implications on our understanding of discourse.

The Verb
by Cem Bozşahin (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 18th of November

Abstract Verbs define thematic structure and argument structure. In one conception of grammar, they also define the basic word order of a language. We know that all possibilities of Subject (S), Object (O) and the verb (V) have been attested in the world's languages, and that there are actually 8 possibilities rather than 6, for a transitive clause. Therefore a theory of grammar must start with eight possibilities for the child for any language. I will show a micro-world experiment about how we can go from such indeterminacy to well-established basic word orders, by relating empirical probabilities to narrowly constrained internal categories, to the point of seeing almost switch-like behavior, without a switch. Implications for other cognitive processes will be discussed, such as planning. Its relation to Language of Thought Hypothesis is also discussed, time permitting.

Applications of Optical Brain Imaging in Human-Computer & Human-Human Interaction
by Murat Perit Çakır (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 11th of November

Abstract Recent advances in sensor design and data acquisition/analysis methods have opened up the possibility to conduct brain imaging studies in the field. The increasing portability of electroencephalography (EEG) and functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) systems allow researchers to study brain dynamics in various ecological settings (e.g. operating some machinery via an interface or engaging in some learning activity). The increasing availability of these systems have also brought the possibility of studying brain dynamics across participants in the context of a collaborative activity. This seminar will provide a brief overview of optical brain imaging methods and illustrate recent studies conducted at our lab to explore the use of fNIRS in domains such as ergonomics, communication and learning.

Group Eye Tracking (GET) Paradigm for Social Cognition Research
by Cengiz Acartürk (Cognitive Science, METU)
on 4th of November

Abstract Multi-user eye tracking (aka. group eye tracking GET) paradigm has opened new horizons for many disciplines ranging from cognitive sciences, education, economics and social psychology to human-computer interaction. In this talk, I will present two studies that have been conducted by using the GET paradigm. The first is a three-player game, where the participants played the game under competitive and elaborative conditions. The second study focuses on a decision-making task, where the participants make risky or conservative monetary choices. My goal is to share the findings, present the challenges in current research, and discuss the future of multi-user eye tracking paradigms.