The lecture series provides a venue in which distinguished scientists from around the world can engage in interdisciplinary dialog with members of the UCSB community to exchange recent breakthroughs in the mind sciences

Phillip Tetlock
U.C. Berkeley

Phillip Tetlock is the Mitchell Professor of Organizational Behavior at the Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley.  He studies how people cope with accountability pressures and conflict resolution. He is the world’s expert on experts, studying how experts think about possible pasts and forecast futures and how they respond to confirmation/disconfirmation of expectations.  His book Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? won the Woodrow Wilson Award for best book published on government, politics, or international affairs.

Title:    The logic of social- functionalist research programs: People as intuitive politicians, prosecutors and theologians.

David Krakauer
Santa Fe Institute

David Krakauer is a Professor at the Santa Fe Institute. His research elucidates the evolutionary history of information processing mechanisms in biology and culture.  His work examines several levels of organization, finding similar processes in genetics, cell biology, microbiology and in organisms’ behavior and society.  His research projects include the molecular logic of signaling pathways, the evolution of genome organization, robust communication over networks, the evolution of distributed forms of biological information processing, dynamical memory systems, and the many ways in which organisms construct their environments, termed niche construction.

Title: The Evolution of Cognitive Systems: Genomes, Cells and Brains.

Elizabeth Spelke
Harvard University

Elizabeth Spelke is the Marshall L. Berkman Professor of Psychology at Harvard University. Her work investigates the development in infants of unique human cognitive capacities such as formal mathematics, object taxonomy, reasoning about other humans, and the use of symbolic representations.  She compares these capacities in children across diverse cultures and to those of non-human primates.  She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has won the 2009 Jean Nicod Prize annually awarded to a leading philosopher of the mind.  In 2005, she debated Steve Pinker in the highly publicized debate entitled The Science of Gender and Science.

Title: Origins of abstract knowledge: Natural geometry.

John Cacioppo
University of Chicago

John Cacioppo is the Tiffany & Margaret Blake Distinguished Service Professor at the Department of Psychology and Director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. He is a leader in social neuroscience and investigates how societal influences and personal relationships affect cognition and emotions, the underlying neural substrates and mechanisms, and peripheral responses.  He uses a variety of methods, including functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), standard and high density electroencephalography, event-related brain potentials, psychophysiological assessments, neuroendocrine and immune assays, and quantitative genetics.  He is the author of the book Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection.

Title: Loneliness

Tania Singer
University of Zurich

Title:

"The Social Neuroscience of Empathy, its Modulation and Plasticity"