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Spring 2014 Talk

Anne Warlaumont, Ph.D.

Assistant Professor of Cognitive and Information Sciences, UC Merced

Friday, May 9 @ 11am
Cognitive Science Building, room 180

Mechanisms for Learning From Social and Intrinsic Rewards in Early Speech Development

During the first year of life, human infants make remarkable progress in acquiring proto-speech production skills, preparing them to produce their first words. I will argue that both social and intrinsic rewards play an important role in this learning. I'll first present some evidence from work with human children, including some of my own work using the LENA system for daylong recording. I'll then present some neural network modeling that demonstrates some possible neural mechanisms wherein social and intrinsic rewards modulate self-organized neural plasticity in the vocal motor system.

Co-hosted with the UC San Diego Department of Cognitive Science