Monday, March 11, 2013

Institute of Human Development/ Change, Plasticity, & Development Seminar: Spring 2013

March 18:  Daphna Buchsbaum
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychology
How do we understand and learn from other's actions? 
Integrating social learning and
 causal inference
 

From an early age, children are exquisitely sensitive social beings, and their causal learning takes place in a rich social context where the goal-directed actions of others lead to many of the causal outcomes children observe. A natural question is therefore how social interaction informs and influences children’s causal learning, and how causal reasoning influences children’s social inferences. In this talk, I will look at how social information, including causal demonstrations and verbal instruction, can be combined with other sources of causal evidence, such as direct observation and the results of our own actions, when making judgments about the causal nature of the world. I will first present studies showing that adults are able to jointly infer causal structure and human action structure from videos of human behavior. I will then present work suggesting that children are able to rationally combine multiple sources of information about which actions are causally necessary when deciding what to imitate, interpreting the same statistical evidence differently when it comes from a knowledgeable teacher versus a naïve demonstrator. Finally, I will present research looking at how children and adults combine direct observation of probabilistic data with causal predictions provided by a social informant, and how this influences their future trust in that informant. Throughout this work, I use computational probabilistic models to evaluate what learners with differing social assumptions should rationally infer from the social and causal evidence they receive. 

April 1:  Marina Everri
Department of Psychology, Università degli Studi di Parma (Italy)
Between continuity and change: The analysis of family micro-transitions
during parents and adolescents conversations 


April 15:  Alison Miller Singley & Zi Lin Sim
Ph.D. Candidates, Department of Psychology


April 29:  Alison L. Miller
Assistant Professor, School of Public Health, University of Michigan



May 6:  Colette Auerswald
Associate Professor of Pediatrics, UCSF


May 13:  Jennifer Arter
Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Psychology

All talks will be held in 3105 Tolman, 12:00-1:30pm.

Monday, March 4, 2013

Health Care Reform Up-Close, Pam Belluck

Pam Belluck, New York Times writer, speaks  March 20th on her study of how one doctor perseveres within the shifting institutional context of health care.  Her new book is Island Practice.

The lecture and discussion will be held in Sutardja Dai Hall, Room 250 from 4-6pm.  Light refreshments will be served.

Ms. Belluck writes for the Times' science page, covering issues of psychology, neuroscience, reproductive and women's health.  She's a jazz musician in her spare time.

Sponsored by Berkeley's graduate schools of Education, Public Health, and Social Welfare, and the UCSF-Berkeley Joint Medical Program and Institute of Human Development.