Colloquium Cognitive Systems

Title: The Metacognition of Participation

Prof. Aaron S. Benjamin (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA)

Abstract:
How do we decide to participate in cognitive activities, and what are the consequences of those choices for ourselves and groups that we belong to? The applied science of cognition often takes the classroom as a model situation. In a classroom, students play only a small role in choosing learning activities, and those activities are shared across students with a wide spectrum of abilities and interests. In many other arenas in life, the cognitive activities in which we participate are ones for which we volunteer, and in which we play the major role in scheduling our work and deciding when we quit. In this talk, I explore the consequences of self-selection on a wide variety of cognitive activities. Choice over participation affects the interpretation of group data, the extent to which individuals benefit from cognitively enhancing events like memory tests, how crowd wisdom can be harnessed, and how artificial intelligence can be designed to have fruitful interactions with human users. I hope to convince you that questions of participation should be front and center in any applied science of cognition.
  
About: 
Aaron S. Benjamin is Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he holds appointments in the Department of Psychology, the Program in Neuroscience, and the Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology. He is currently Assistant Head of Psychology, and has previously served as Acting Head. Benjamin’s research program addresses basic and applied questions in human cognition. He uses empirical and computational approaches to understanding attention, learning, memory, and decision-making. His research includes the development of novel experimental methodology, data analytics, and computational models.