BEGIN:VCALENDAR
VERSION:2.0
PRODID:-//Talks.cam//talks.cam.ac.uk//
X-WR-CALNAME:Talks.cam
BEGIN:VEVENT
SUMMARY:Understanding the minds of others: A psycholinguistic approach to 
 Theory of Mind - Dr Heather Ferguson\, Department of Linguistics\, Univers
 ity College London
DTSTART:20081030T170000Z
DTEND:20081030T183000Z
UID:TALK14453@talks.cam.ac.uk
CONTACT:Catherine Davies
DESCRIPTION:During conversation it is often necessary to infer other peopl
 es' beliefs\, intentions and emotions to understand and predict their beha
 viour (termed\ntheory of mind- ToM). Although considerable research has ex
 amined the perception of mental states in general\, conclusions on the spe
 cific processes involved in inferring\, maintaining and selecting appropri
 ate\nperspectives during communication have so far been limited by offline
  response-based methods. Further\, the role of language in 'mindreading' t
 asks has only recently emerged as an important issue following neuropsycho
 logical evidence that traditional ToM brain areas are also active for ling
 uistic coherence processes. In this talk\, I will present a series of expe
 riments that use established online techniques from psycholinguistics to e
 xamine issues such as the automaticity of belief attributions and the spec
 ific role of higher-level language (through comparisons with counterfactua
 l conditionals) in ToM processes. Finally\, I will discuss how these findi
 ngs relate to evidence from social psychology in support of a gender bias 
 in\ncognition.\n
LOCATION:LG17\, Law Faculty\, 10 West Road (Sidgwick Site)
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR