CogSci Colloquium: Hyo Gweon (Stanford)
Thinking, Learning, and Communicating About the World and About the Self
Abstract: Humans are not the only species that learns from others, but only humans learn and communicate in rich, diverse social contexts. What makes human social learning so distinctive, powerful, and smart? I will first introduce the idea that human social learning is inferential at its core; even young children learn from others by drawing rich inferences from others’ behaviors, and help others learn by generating evidence tailored to others’ goals and knowledge. I will then present more recent work that extends this idea to understand how young children think, learn, and communicate about the self. Going beyond the idea that young children are like scientists who explore and learn about the external world, these results demonstrate how early-emerging social intelligence supports thinking, learning, and communicating about the inner world.
Bio: Hyowon (Hyo) Gweon is an Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Stanford University. She has been named as a Richard E. Guggenhime Faculty Scholar (2020) and a David Huntington Dean's Faculty Scholar (2019), and currently serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for the Department of Psychology and the Symbolic Systems Program. Hyo received her PhD in Cognitive Science (2012) from MIT, where she continued as a postdoc before joining Stanford in 2014.
Hyo is broadly interested in how humans learn from others and help others learn. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines developmental, computational, and neuroimaging methods, her research aims to explain the cognitive underpinnings of distinctively human learning, communication, and prosocial behaviors.
The colloquium series is designed to provide a focus for all those on campus who have interests in the cognitive sciences. The organizing committee consists of Peter Carruthers & Elizabeth Schechter (Philosophy), Jeff Lidz (Linguistics), Naomi Feldman (Linguistics & UMIACS), Robert Slevc (Psychology), Lucas Butler (Human Development), and Yi Ting Huang (Hearing and Speech Sciences). Nominations of potential future colloquium speakers are welcome. Support for the colloquium is provided by the Departments of Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology, Hearing and Speech Sciences, and by the Neuroscience and Cognitive Science program (NACS). Meetings are held on Thursdays in Fall and Spring Semesters, roughly bi-weekly, 3.30-5.30 pm in Patterson (HJP) 2124. All interested faculty and students are invited to attend.
