EVENT: Special Lunchtime Psychology Colloquium: Prof Simon Garrod (Glasgow)

Psychology Colloquium

Tuesday 22nd November 12:00-1:00pm in Bayliss MCS G.33

Presenter: Prof Simon Garrod (Glasgow)

Title: Cognitive Science for joint activities and dialogue.

Abstract:

This talk presents a cognitive framework for analyzing joint activities in general and dialogue in particular. Joint activities present challenges for traditional monadic cognitive science. For example, joint activities depend on essentially dyadic properties such as alignment, synchronization and distributed control: properties that only make sense jointly between two or more people. I will propose a system-based Bulletin Board framework to represent both the private cognitive aspects of joint activities and their public expression. I will then show how this framework can be used to interpret interactive communication in terms of individual interlocutors working together to produce and control a dialogue.

Speaker Bio:

Simon Garrod is Professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Glasgow. He has published two books, Understanding Written Language, with Anthony J. Sanford, and, Seeing, Saying and Acting: The Psychological Semantics of Spatial Prepositions with Kenny R. Coventry. He has also published various articles on interactive language processing with Martin Pickering including Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue (BBS, 2004) and An integrated theory of language production and comprehension (BBS, 2013). His special interests include discourse processing, dialogue, psychological semantics, and graphical communication. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and was awarded the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the Society for Text and Discourse.