Meeting with Karen Wynn from Yale today!

Highlight of the Day:

Karen Wynn, PI of Infant Cognition Lab at Yale, came and gave a talk at CLPS today. The talk was called "Mapping the Social Terrain, or Early Social Evaluation: the Good, the Bad, the Ugly". She basically talked about recent research at her lab, which are:

Claims:

Social assessment...

that goes social, behavioral, emotional...

can guide thoughts, actions, ...

Very early...

Part 1: The Moral Baby

about +/- value

Study 1: Hamlin, Wynn, Bloom, 2007&2010

Measurement: Reaching (elder) & Looking (super young)

2007: Helping & Hinding

2010: Giving & Taking

2011:Opening a box

So, what work do baby's judgment do?

Who deserves good & bad treatment?

Condition: Giving a treat to; taking a treat away from.

How should others treat nice&mean guys?

5, 8, 19 month old

Social extension: Antisocial

Part 2: The discriminating baby

social evaluation; attractive, race, language, etc.

10 month old: baby prefer characters with more resources (bananas), but not inanimate things like boxs.

babies prefer ones who are similar to them (like the same type of food)

As a summary, babies understanding of a group:

Baby don't like:

Antisocial

Different from them.

Later on in our half-an-hour one-on-one conversation, we talked about my current research and future interests, which can be partly summarized as "stepping out of the egocentric frame of reference", and how I chose to step into my area (a little bit about AI and it's developing direction in decades which is to understand human social interaction). 

(By the way, the spot I chose to have this meeting was awesome! Beautiful view of Lincoln Field in sunset. I also bought Latte for us to enjoy our meeting more)

We also talked about her research. She was really interested when I mentioned the following two points:

1. The study she did which shows that babies emulate the following behaviors of the good character rather than the bad.

2. Physical coercion and mental coercion.

And there is one point that I forgot to mention, which is:

But both Bertram and I questioned whether it is because they ACT similarly, or they have similar GOAL/TARGET. This is rather different, I believe. But they haven't tried to tease it apart.

And she also mentioned a paper on perspective taking and a AI (related with ToM) at Yale that worth visiting.

Basically that's it!

Link of the Day:

1. MATLAB Webinar is definitely cool! Today they had a webinar on computer vision. I wonder whether you can download the video afterwards somewhere...

The only disappointing thing is, no one in my lab has any interests in MATLAB (you "moral" and "free will" guys!), but I don't what to waste my programming skills...

2. Karen recommended Brian Scasselatti at CS Dept at Yale. His research is definitely cool, and I'll explore later!

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http://xuan-littleworld.blogspot.com/2011/10/meeting-with-karen-wynn-from-yale-today.html