A large body of research on schizophrenia and those at risk for this illness has documented robust impairments in episodic memory. Recent research has attempted to apply theoretical and empirical advances from the fields of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience to help understand the specific nature of such episodic memory deficits in schizophrenia, as well as their neurobiological mechanisms. This talk will overview a series of studies designed to identify the specific component processes of episodic memory that are impaired in schizophrenia, and to understand their relationship to impairments in prefrontally mediated cognitive control operations that may influence a number of different cognitive domains. This research has suggested that impairments in the ability to utilize effective strategies at encoding (and perhaps retrieval) are a significant source of memory impairment in this illness, and that these deficits in the strategic use of memory are related to impaired dorsolateral prefrontal cortex function. Further, experimental manipulations designed to support the use of effective memory strategies can improve both behavior and brain function among individuals with schizophrenia. More recent research, however, suggests that these prefrontally mediated strategy impairments interact with morphological and functional changes in the hippocampus to constrain the degree to which memory can be enhanced in schizophrenia.

The principal theme of this talk is the interplay between the different ways of studying cognition and behavior in philosophy, scientific psychology and the neurosciences. We can explore this interplay through what I call the interface problem. This is the problem of explaining how (if at all) commonsense (or folk psychological) explanations of mental states and behavior interface with the explanations of cognition and mental operations given by scientific psychology, cognitive science, cognitive neuroscience and the other levels in the hierarchy of disciplines devoted to the study of the mind/brain. The talk introduces some useful tools for thinking about the interface problem, such as the distinction between personal and subpersonal levels of explanation and the idea that the psychological states invoked in commonsense explanations of behavior may be emergent.

One of the most active areas of research in cognitive neuroscience has been the investigation of brain mechanisms that enable the self-regulation of thoughts and action, a function termed cognitive (or executive) control. Recent work has focused on identifying distinct cognitive control functions, and how these might be implemented in terms of interacting neural circuits. Progress in these efforts have been aided by an integrative approach that combines functional neuroimaging and computational modeling methods. In this talk, I will provide two examples of this approach: 1) the role of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) interactions in mediating cognitive control adjustments in response to experienced conflict; and 2) the role of lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) and midbrain dopamine (DA) system interactions in mediating the updating of goal representations in working memory.

We had two important turns, linguistic turn and cognitive turn, in philosophy last century continuously. Philosophy of language and philosophy of mind then sprung out one after another. Human has special way of cognition different from animal's, which with or without symbol language. So, we have to research human cognition with suitable models based on our language. In this paper, human's cognition with language will be told from animal's cognition without language. The relation between mind and language as well as language and world will be discussed. The author will analyze the differences of meanings in logic, in philosophy as well as in cognition, and discuss an important issue about how we learn. Afterward, twin structures in our brain when we learn and think would be analyzed in details, then, a cognitive model on these structures would be given. Finally, some very important terms in cognition such as learning, memory, thinking, speaking, reading even understanding, would be reconsidered according to these structures and models.

In this talk, I show how multilevel mechanistic explanations scaffold the unity of neuroscience. Philosophers of neuroscience traditionally envision the unity of neuroscience as being achieved through the stepwise reduction of higher-level theories to successively lower-level, and ultimately fundamental, theories. I argue, in contrast, that the unity of neuroscience is achieved as different fields integrate their research by adding constraints on multilevel mechanistic explanations. The goal of finding multilevel explanations provides an abstract sketch or scaffold for integrating fields. The findings in different fields of neuroscience are used, like the tiles of a mosaic, to elaborate this abstract mechanism and to shape the space of possible mechanisms. The mosaic unity of neuroscience is achieved both through interfield integration at a given level and through integration across levels in a hierarchy of mechanisms. I develop this model using a putative exemplar of reduction in contemporary neuroscience: the relationship between the psychological phenomena of learning and memory and the electrophysiological phenomenon, Long-Term Potentiation (LTP). I thereby demonstrate that the mosaic view is superior to reduction as a model of the unity of neuroscience.

An important feature of human intelligence is the use of language consisting of symbols (words) as a result of evolution of human communication, which makes human brain grow upward. Because languages consist of ordinal words which are based on syntax and semantic rules, many researchers are exploring the representation and operation of words in human brain, seeking their construction principle and computational theory. In order to construct the language hierarchical structure model for natural language understanding, we need to know how the lexical conceptual map can be imitated with the aid of neural networks; how it simulates the conceptual learning, conceptual and semantic relations, word order and grammar rules; how background knowledge is expressed; how conceptual description of lexical features appropriates with human brain's processing.

In fact, whether neuroimaging or neural network method, the displayable analysis for the lexical feature data can reveal the similarity extent among object-attribute, relation structure and semantic topology relation. It is very useful for natural language understanding if there is semantic understanding of relevance. As a rule, the semantic features of conceptual nouns are described in high dimension vectors. For expedient comparison of neuroimaging localization of cognitive operations and syntactic processing with pattern recognition technology, we adopted the feature compression technologies which map high dimension features to low dimension, and hold enough main information to distinguish the sorts among conceptual nouns. Chinese is different from English, Chinese sentences do not have the change of tense and morphology. The response of human brain for Chinese lexical information is based mainly on conceptual and semantic attributes, seldom using Chinese syntax and grammar features. Our experimental results show that feature description plays an important role in the map area of nouns, verbs and class-ambiguous words: If the semantic features are only selected, then the mapped areas of the three kinds of words overlap mutually, they can not be classified simply. When we strengthen the role of syntax features, and weaken the role of semantic features, the overlapping of the mapped distributing areas for the three kinds of words decreases or nearly disappears. If the syntax features are only selected, then the three kinds of words are completely mapped at three different (non-overlap) areas. Our experiments are coincident with human brain's neuroimaging.

Text automatic classification based on cognitive science is a cutting-edge research topic both in studying brain cognitive systems and natural language processing. Extraction of brain cognitive principles improves understanding of natural language. Its theoretical models will lead to benefits both the cognitive science and the natural language processing. It will provide feedback to experimental methods concerning the validity of interpretations and suggestions, and enable us to create semantic methods which let the computer to understand language. Our aim is to understand the biological mechanisms of text classification and its role in perception and behavioral simulation. Although neuroimaging methods by using localization of cognitive operations within the human brain can be applied to studies of neural networks, the conventional syntax techniques are still ineffective in natural language processing due to a lack of semantic understanding of relevance, in addition the concept attributes are much better to reflect the content of the documents, we can get a much better vector space by using the concept attributes and semantic information. A man learns and acquires knowledge by the mode of "learn - practise - relearn - repractise", it suggests us that neural networks are trained by supervisory initiative learning, we introduce the feedback learning to text classification, thus the classification system is extended into a mode of "training - classification - feedback retraining".

During the training process, the worth classification results can be selected, it can update the parameters of classification model according to feedback results, and reflect the cerebral cognitive process. By combining the unsupervised training and supervisory training to form the network of separate structure, the network structure is closer to brain's one.

There are now several lines of evidence that, in comprehending sentences, the brain respects some distinction between semantic and syntactic processes. I will discuss how, when and where these processes interact to build up meaning in the brain. I will describe a series of studies using event-related potentials (ERPs) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) exploring the spatiotemporal neural correlates of violating semantic relationships between verbs and their arguments that lie at the heart of the semantic-syntactic interface.

ERP and fMRI findings converge to suggest that, within simple, active English sentences, semantic violations between verbs (denoting actions) and their subjects (denoting Agents carrying out these actions) evoke a neural response that is more similar to that evoked by morphosyntactic violations between verbs and their arguments, than to that evoked by violations arising only at the level of our real world semantic knowledge. On the basis of these data, I will suggest that normal language comprehension proceeds along at least two dissociable but highly interactive neural processing streams: an associative semantic memory-based mechanism that is based mainly on accessing the frequency of co-occurrence of words or events, as stored within semantic memory, and a combinatorial mechanism in which structure is assigned to a sentence not only on the basis of morphosyntactic rules, but also on the basis of certain action-relevant (thematic) semantic constraints.

Based on ERP data, I will suggest that the semantic memory-based analysis operates as a first-pass mechanism, primarily between 300-500msec, and that a morphosyntactic and thematic-semantic combinatorial analysis around a verb begins within this time window, at least partially in parallel to semantic memory-based processing. Any conflicts between the different representations that are output by the semantic memory-based and combinatorial streams lead to continued or second-pass combinatorial analysis, operating between 500-900msec. This may serve as a double check to ensure that we effectively make sense of incoming information.

Based on fMRI data, I will suggest that the semantic memory-based analysis is reliant on activity within the left anterior inferior frontal cortex that, together with temporal cortices, acts to retrieve information about the likelihood of events in the real world. In contrast, both morphosyntactic and thematic-semantic combinatorial analyses around a verb appear to engage a common frontal/inferior parietal/basal ganglia network, known to mediate the execution and comprehension of goal-directed action.

Finally, based on both ERP and fMRI studies examining visual actions depicted within short, silent movie-clips, I will suggest that that these two processing streams may generalize beyond the language system and may also be engaged in relating people, objects and action during real-world event comprehension.

I will conclude by considering the implications of this model of language and real-world visual comprehension for understanding neurocognitive basis of neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia.

The central aim of this study is to explore a new coping resource in respective of college students. To represent the new coping resource conceptually, We constructed a new concept named as Life Control. Simply put, life control is the sense of life being in control, that is, a great control by the universe. To examine whether life control is an effective coping resource, we establish a conceptual framework for answering the following question: How does life control affect on the relationship of stress and psychological well-being?

The hypothesis is indeed exploring whether or how life control, uniquely contribute to psychological well-being under stresses. Across a wide variety of situations, perceived control is associated with better emotional well-being, more successful coping with stress, better health and physiological outcomes, success at making behavior changes, and improved performance. Although perceived control is generally considered as personal control, a common secular perspective on religion assumes that belief in spiritual or God as an active agent in one's life requires relinquishing a sense of personal or internal control. A number of studies suggested that there were significant relationships between spiritual support and well-being for the high-stress than low-stress people. Based on the above discussions, the hypothesis is proposed as follows: Life control is associated with adaptive psychological outcomes, and the association is more significant under high college stresses than low college stresses.

The main study was conducted after some in-depth interviews and a validation study. The in-depth interviews suggested the existence of the phenomenon of life control while the validation study developed the measure of life control. Findings of the main study fully confirmed the positive direct effects of life control on the psychological well-being, and partially confirmed the moderating effects of life control on the psychological well-being under stress.

Now the mental health problems of entrepreneurs has gradually drawn people's attention, much stress, which causes kinds of bad influences on the mental heath of entrepreneurs, making many entrepreneurs suffer from the psychological diseases. Since 1980s of the last century, there have been more than 1,200 entrepreneurs who have chosen the way to committing suicide for sorts of psychological obstacles. Researchers have turned their eyes into this area. This research focuses on the problem of the success and failure which entrepreneurs must face in the stiff market competitions, find the solving origin from the traditional culture, searching the influence and function of the traditional culture success views on the entrepreneur's mental health. This research will probe into these questions bellow:

1. Why do the traditional culture success views influence the mental heath of entrepreneurs?

2. Which of the contents of the traditional culture success views influence the mental heath of entrepreneurs?

3. The traditional culture success views influence which of the contents of the mental heath of entrepreneurs?

It is an amazing fact that children's language ability can almost reach adults' competence in the earliest few years of their life and it attracts many scholars to investigate how children first bootstrap into a language. In many studies of early language bootstrapping, verb acquisition is exclusively considered to be a decisive part for they can be seen as "framing" the grammatical structure of a language (Pinker, 1984, 1989; Gleitman, 1990). In his semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, Pinker (1984) uses the concept of verb subcategorization frames and suggests an innate mechanism—linking rule for children, the ability to link thematic roles to syntactic functions. The innate-linking rule hypothesis is supported by the very late appearance of noncanonical English verbs and passives which reverse the canonical arrangement of agent and patient. However, the innateness of linking rule is queried by some scholars who believe that the linking pattern is learned rather than innate (see Foley and Van Valin 1984, Bowerman, 1990). Bowerman (1990) argues against this and suggests that it may be the result of rare input of such structures.

In this study, we look longitudinal spontaneous speech of a Chinese child before her second year of life and corresponding adults input to explore the use of ergative verbs, a particular kind of verbs whose object in transitive form can be used as the subject of the intransitive form with an equivalent meaning. Different from canonical intransitive verbs, ergative verbs involve only one internal argument for its intransitive form. It is found that ergative structures are abundant in adults' utterances and no evidence in the child's utterance is spotted to show difficulty in their acquisition of such a structure. The child acquires the ergative structure and the canonical SVO structure almost at the same time. In the study of ergativity in the child's utterances, we hope to address the issue of linking and some other bootstrapping problems.

When people remember events in social contexts, what they recall is quite different from what is typically recalled in the laboratory. Retellings in real life often do not emphasize accuracy; both the content and the language of storytelling depend on social factors like goals (e.g., entertainment) and audience (e.g., peers). Such biased retellings have consequences for memory. When subjects try to remember original events, their memories are affected by the stories they told. While selective rehearsal can explain some of the effects of retellings, at least some of the observed effects are due to imposing a new schema during retelling. This work relates to the workshop theme of "Collective memory and the social context of language" and I would be interested in discussing how cross-cultural differences in conversational norms may lead to very different retellings, with consequences for memory.

Memories about people are shaped by social contexts, including expectations and attitudes about social groups. In some cases, group attitudes lead to distorted memories, raising the question of how people can control the influences of social context on memory. Research on memory and meta-cognition shows that some aspects of memory are more easily monitored and controlled than others. Drawing on Jacoby's dual process framework, I will present research showing that in some cases, social contexts influence conscious recollection, which is easily monitored and controlled. In other cases, social context affects automatic uses of memory. Automatic influences of social context shape memory reports even when respondents are encouraged to report nothing at all rather than make errors. The research addresses the workshop themes of collective memory and social context. It also bridges social psychological and individual cognitive levels of analysis, speaking to the workshop's theme of multilevel explanation.

In order to learn how to read and write, children must develop the ability to think of words as things that can be represented themselves, independently of the objects they represent. This is because writing is a second-order symbol system, symbolizing something that is a symbol itself (spoken language). The understanding of written language required for reading development is often called metalinguistic awareness. Metalinguistic awareness is a form of metarepresentation, as it requires one to grasp a representation as a representation. The ability for metarepresentation is thought to be a critical feature of distinctively human thought. Exploration of metalinguistic awareness can thus further our understanding of the cognitive abilities required for reading development, and of the nature and significance of metarepresentational abilities for human cognition more generally. My presentation seeks to address both these issues. First, I characterize the metalinguistic ability required for understanding written language and discuss empirical results suggesting when and how children achieve this understanding. Second, I compare metalinguistic awareness to another metarepresentational ability--metacognitive awareness--to see whether similar analyses can be given for each cognitive achievement and, further, whether anything general can be said about metarepresentational abilities in light of these two cases. Third, I will address unique issues raised by metalinguistic awareness: the need for cross-modal representations, and potential differences in the type of metalinguistic awareness required across writing systems.

Reading and writing are some of the most important skills that children acquire at school, and the study of literacy development has been of interest to developmental psychologists, cognitive psychologists, and linguists, as well as to educators. I will begin my talk by considering the nature of the world's writing systems and some of the similarities and differences among them. I will then discuss the hurdles that children face in learning to read and spell. The research studies I review primarily involve English and other alphabetic writing systems, but studies of Chinese will also be mentioned. I will pay special attention to children's spelling errors and the light they shed on children's developing understanding of writing. Most of the research I review examines typical children. However, studies of children with dyslexia (specific problems in learning to read and spell) will also be mentioned.

Lying is a special kind of speech act. In many pragmatic theories, sincerity is a very important presupposition among speech acts or communication behaviors. Nevertheless, lying, as the opposite of sincerity, plays its role in human society; it's common and unavoidable.

In this talk, we will discuss the position of lying in the speech act theory, looking at how Austin and Searle discuss the lying behavior. Besides, we will introduce three traits about lying: 1) it is usually defined as speaking falsehood; 2) it is usually reprimanded by the society; and 3) it is usually assumed as ugly; we will analyze lying through the method of psycho-logic under the frame of truthfulness, goodness and beauty. The issue about intentionality, free will, and creativity will be included, too. Finally, we will try to discuss the possibility of whether a machine can lie.

Collective memory is a topic that is widely discussed, yet poorly understood. In order to deal with it in a conceptual rigorous fashion, we need theoretical constructs that make it both understandable and an object of empirical study. In this presentation such constructs will be outlined and harnessed to examine an empirical illustration. Specifically, the notion of "schematic narrative template" will be presented and used to examine Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory of World War II. This exercise gives rise to the notion of "deep memory" as a powerful force in shaping collectives' representations of the past.

Studies of "distributed" and "socially shared" cognition and memory have recently emerged in developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology in the U.S. and Europe. This presentation will outline basic tenets of this research and examine how current ideas reflect--and in some cases draw on studies conducted earlier in the twentieth century by figures such as L.S. Vygotsky and A.R. Luria. The "sociocultural" approach proposed by them raises several issues that complement contemporary laboratory studies of cognition and memory.

Based on rich cognitive, material, ecological and ideological conditions, religion is a universal cultural phenomenon across human history. In this talk, we will try to analyze the cultural phenomena of religion in light of information science and related self-organization theories. It is argued that religion itself is not an innate human capacity, nor is it an evolutionary dilemma, as many studies in and outside anthropology focus on, but a vast set of "information programs" abounding in all kind of societies and imprinted on various human beings. Notably, religion is especially prominent in remote times and an integral part of those cultures; besides, in historically seminal periods, individual crisis or other liminal moments, religion is most infective and powerful. Whatever form and content it is, the essence of religious activities' efficacy is the same: starting from metaphors--rich repertory of information, and thus leading to collective and individual order. In this process from metaphor to order, there lie principles of self-organization: information's crucial role in order-formation ubiquitous in both natural world and cultural field.

Acquisition of passives, which involves dislocation of subjects and objects of a sentence, has been a topic of interest for linguists and psycholinguists, both theoretically and empirically. Previous research indicates that the passive construction is acquired relatively late, not until children are about 5 years old and children's passives in different languages display distinct patterns. The present study explores children's production and comprehension of passives in Mandarin Chinese, with the hope to get a better understanding of universal as well as language-specific properties of passives in language development.

Three experiments, two comprehension tasks and a production task, are designed The two comprehension tasks are aimed at investigating children's comprehension of passives. We are particularly concerned about what patterns Chinese children display in their passives, and whether factors, such as sentence length (long vs. short passives), verb types (action vs. non-action, mono-syllabic vs. bi-syllabic), and the affectedness of the logical object (disposed vs. indisposed) influence children's comprehension of passives or not. In the comprehension task, children from age 3 to 6 will be asked to identify a picture out of two that goes with the test stimulus. The elicited production task, is designed to examine how children use the passive construction in different contexts and see how children become sensitive to requirements such as adversity and the complex predicate requirement. Subjects are asked to look at some pictures and to describe them.

We have several predictions at the moment. First, children's performance may vary when dealing with passives with or without agent, because these two types of passives involve different types of movement, which is a core element in the acquisition of passive acquisition. Second, affectedness of the logical object of passive construction may be another factor which influences children's performance. In other words, passives with actional verbs and those with object-experiencer psychological verbs, may be comprehended better than those with subject-experiencer psychological verbs.

In the study of grammatical development, there exist two opposing views. Proponents of the role of nature, particularly generative nativists like Chomsky, assume the existence of innate linguistic principles, in the form of UG.. It is argued that the superficially simple and sometimes erroneous sentences in early language development are in fact constrained by rules. For advocates of the role of nurture, such as Tomasello and Lieven, early grammatical development is usage-based and driven by the input data the child is exposed to. Language development is supposed to be guided by general cognitive principles rather than innate language-specific principles. In this view, early sentences are fairly simple and are free of abstract syntactic rules.

In this talk, we will discuss recent findings from L1 acquisition of Chinese. Such findings argue against usage-based learning. It will be shown that early sentences in naturalist production of Chinese children are fairly complex, featuring early knowledge of abstract syntactic categories.

Reading represents one of the most important skills human beings can acquire, but has proven difficult to study naturalistically using functional neuroimaging techniques. In this talk, I describe a new 'ultra-rapid' fMRI approach that enables single-word processes to be studied within the context of rapidly presented narrative text. I discuss the results of two experiments demonstrating that word-level differences in variables such as word frequency and length reliably modulate brain activation, often in ways discrepant from previous findings. Finally, I illustrate the flexibility and power of an ultra-rapid fMRI approach to reading by using it to empirically validate a newly-developed lexical measure that captures the distance of each English word from other words in the lexicon.

Developmental stages in reading English words were examined among 118 Chinese children in Grades 2, 4, and 6 from a working-class elementary school in Tianjin, China. Proficiency in Chinese and English, ability to make orthographic analogies in both languages, and strategies in reading English words were assessed. Results suggested that Chinese children follow similar stages in alphabetic reading development to those of native English-speaking children: the Pre-Alphabetic stage, the Partial-Alphabetic stage, and the Full-Alphabetic stage. The use of orthographic analogy does not form a separate stage independent of the alphabetic decoding stages; rather, it is a concurrent option available to Chinese children from an early age. Children more readily made onset-vowel analogies than vowel-coda analogies.

Epistemic logic is supposed to give a formal analysis for the notions such as knowledge, belief, awareness, memory and other propositional attitudes, by means of logical and semantic tools. These notions ought to be in the spotlight of philosophy of mind too, especially in the problem of other minds, the models about knowledge and its function should have been explored in cooperation. In this paper, it is shown that a number of possibilities is opened up by attempting to analyze the knowledge transmissibility like KaKbp?Kap, which is discussed both in epistemic logic and in other minds. Among the proposed foci are: (i) The transmission of knowledge among the set of agents like {a, b, c, d,…} must overcome the skepticism of other minds. The agents and their sense are among the major concerns in the new generation of epistemic logic. (ii) In a multi-agent system, if knowing is regarded as a mental state, consideration about first person or third person need to be added to the game-theoretic semantics. These two connections are explored here from both logical and philosophical perspectives. Regarding the research of philosophy of mind, new extensions of epistemic logic are defined, increasing formal understanding of knowing and knowing information processing in philosophy of mind.

This paper brings forward the concept of "cultural attractor," aiming at explaining the mechanism of collective-memory formation. The legend of the Pagoda Tree, referring to a pagoda tree in Hongdong, Shanxi province, is the symbolic expression of a large-scale emigration from North China, motivated by the imperial court of Ming Dynasty. Various versions of this legend point to the same sentiment: most of their "descendents" in numerous places took Hongdong Pagoda Tree as their ancestral home and where their "roots" were. According to the author's study, this legend is actually a cultural fiction during the age from Late Qing Dynasty to Early Republic of China, which then evolved into prevalent "collective memory". We will try to explain the formation of this kind of collective memory, using the concept of "cultural attractor."

Perceptual alternation of ambiguous figures is a kind of perceptual rivalry. Using intermittent and continuous presentations of the Necker cube, we investigated temporal factors contributing to the rate of perceptual alternations. We used the net Average Reversal Interval (netARI) to measure the perceptual alternation rate, calculated by dividing the accumulated time of the appearance periods by the number of reversals. This calculation eliminates the time during disappearance periods, because perceived reversals do not occur during this time. The results showed: (1) presenting an ambiguous figure intermittently increased the perceptual alternation rate; (2) the longer the appearance periods, the slower the perceptual alternation rate; (3) the length of disappearance periods (which ranged from 1 s to 5 s) did not affect the alternation rate. Together these results we speculate the information between two disappearance periods is necessary for perceptual alternation. Similar studies about binocular rivalry will also be discussed here.

This presentation will be aimed at an analysis of the problem of self-consciousness as in Bermúdez (1998). The analysis will be set in a context of contrasting philosophical methodologies, embodied in the intersections among rationalism, empiricism, internalism and externalism. With this analysis, the problem of self-consciousness will be given a clearer picture. In particular, an examination will be done on the different ways in which the paradox of self-consciousness might be dissolved. As a tentative conclusion, Bermúdez (1998)'s proposal does not seem to live up to the expectation to dissolve the paradox of self-consciousness.