Zoom link: https://mit.zoom.us/j/2711902511

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Speaker: Young-eun Lee

Affiliation: Saxelab

Title:  Children learn what is right or wrong from legitimate punishment

Abstract: Children must learn the norms of their society. One source of information is observing parents, teachers and other authorities to see which behaviors they punish. We test the hypothesis that young children selectively learn that punished actions are wrong, only when they deem the punisher to be legitimate.  Across three pre-registered studies, 6- to 11-year-old children in the United States heard vignettes in which an authority decided whether to punish another character for doing an unfamiliar action, and reported how right or wrong the unfamiliar action was. In Studies 1 and 2, older children (age 9-11 years), but not younger children (age 6-8 years), learned norms selectively from punishment by legitimate authorities. In a more familiar context with teachers as authorities (Study 3), younger children also learned selectively from legitimate authorities. I will discuss how punishment and children's learning of socio-moral norms might interact in middle childhood.

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Speaker: Thomas Langlois

Affiliation: Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory (primary), Seethapathi Motor Control Group (secondary)

Abstract: Visual perception is guided by moment-to-moment sensory evidence combined with prior expectations. Although priors (and other subjective probability distributions) are key to visual perception, they are notoriously difficult to estimate because perception is an inherently private (subjective) experience. In this talk, I will briefly highlight work using large-scale serial reproduction experiments to obtain stable estimates of subjective probability distributions. I will touch on theoretical insights gained from the empirical data and (time permitting), I will end with a brief discussion of recent work from animal (macaque) experiments that reveal how the brain combines sensory information with prior expectations during vision.

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Brief Speaker Bios:

Young-eun Lee is a postdoctoral fellow in the Saxelab broadly interested in how a sense of justice emerges in humans. In the Saxelab, Young-eun examines the development of punishment against selfish behaviors and is particularly interested in children's reasoning and motives underlying third-party punishment.

Thomas Langlois is a postdoctoral fellow jointly working with the Computational Psycholinguistics Laboratory and Seethapathi Motor Control Group. He currently works on applications of the Information Bottleneck Principle to explore the relationship between perceptual (visual) representations and language across language speakers.