Carleton University Art Gallery (CUAG) invites you to a community conversation on issues of young adults and substance use and abuse in Ottawa. Join researchers, professors, frontline workers, and students in a discussion of the psychology of addiction and links with mental health, new trends in substance abuse in Ottawa, support systems on campus, and city-wide strategies for prevention and education.

This discussion is organized in conjunction with Live Through This: Photographs by Tony Fouhse. It will be moderated by Fiona Wright, CUAG’s Education and Community Outreach Manager, with a special introduction by Tony Fouhse.

Admission is free and everyone is welcome! See below for information on discount parking.

Participants:

Jesse Auguste is an Honours undergraduate psychology student, minoring in Neuroscience. His upcoming thesis will concentrate on addiction, supervised by Dr. John Weekes. He works on the Carleton University campus at the Health and Counseling Office, helping to prepare presentations and resources on substance abuse for students. He also works as a youth facilitator for the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario, where he facilitates focus groups and prepares presentations for youth across Ottawa, and as a Child/Youth Worker for the City of Ottawa.

Dr. Kim Hellemans is an Instructor II in the Department of Neuroscience at Carleton University. She received her Master’s and Ph.D. from Queen’s University, where her research focused on understanding the biological basis of drug addiction. She went on to complete post-doctoral positions at Cambridge University (2004-06) and University of British Columbia (2006-08) prior to taking a position at Carleton University in 2008. She has won the Capital Educators Award (2010), the Carleton University New Faculty Excellence in Teaching Award (2011), the Faculty of Science Teaching Award (2012) and most recently, a Teaching Achievement Award (2013). Outside of her academic life, she is a strong supporter of women’s issues; she has previously sat on the Board of Directors for the Society for Canadian Women in Science and Technology, and was Vice-President of the Board of Directors for Amethyst, a women’s addiction treatment centre in Ottawa from 2008-2012.

Terry-Lynne Marko graduated from the University of Western Ontario in 1984 with a Bachelor of Science in Nursing. She has worked at Ottawa Public Health since 2001, most recently with the Injury Prevention & Substance Misuse team. Within this team, she works with many individuals, families, and community groups and partners. In one project, she worked with more than 30 community partners to look at the issue of marijuana and youth. She was the author and project coordinator for the “Why Drive High?” marijuana and driving social marketing campaign, which targeted high school and post-secondary students, funded by Health Canada’s Community Initiative fund. Presently she is working to mobilize Ottawa’s post-secondary campuses and selected community partners around the issue of binge drinking.

Tyler Pirie is a Research and Policy Analyst at the Canadian Centre on Substance Abuse (CCSA). He is a Carleton alumni and joined CCSA in 2011 after graduating from the Schulich School of Medicine, where he obtained a M.Sc. in epidemiology and biostatistics. Prior to working for CCSA, Tyler worked at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), Carleton University, and Statistics Canada. Tyler is currently involved in projects that explore new and emerging substance use patterns and trends, the utilization of substance use treatment services in Canada, and the efficacy of brief interventions to reduce the non-medical use of psychoactive substances.

Discount parking:

CUAG is located in the St. Patrick’s Building. See CUAG’s website for a map of the gallery’s location and parking. http://cuag.carleton.ca/index.php/visiting/directions/
Please take advantage of our special $4.00 (flat fee) parking rate. You must purchase a hangtag from CUAG for your car’s rear-view mirror.
From 6:30 – 7:00, you can drive to the roundabout in front of the tunnel entrance near Leeds House residence. CUAG staff will be standing just inside the tunnel entrance and can sell you a pass.\
Next, find a parking spot in the “Pay and Display” visitors’ section of Lot 6, labelled “P6” on the map.

Born in Iran, he spent his young childhood years living in Cambridge, England.  From England, his family moved to Norway.  It wasn’t until the early eighties that Asudeh and his family took the trip across the Atlantic Ocean and settled in Ottawa, the city where he would become the first recipient of the undergraduate degree in Cognitive Science at Carleton University. 

Upon his graduation from Carleton in 1996, Asudeh would return to Europe for his Master of Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, which he attended on a Commonwealth Scholarship.

Finally, after achieving his master’s, Asudeh would cross the Atlantic one more time; this time to complete his formal education in California at Stanford University on a SSHRC Doctoral Fellowship and a Whiting Fellowship. At Stanford, he would focus much of his research on the relationship between syntax (language structure) and semantics (language meaning).

Exactly 10 years after completing his undergrad, Asudeh made his return to Carleton University in 2006. As a member of the Logic, Language and Information Lab at Carleton and a professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, Asudeh has a myriad of research interests including semantics, pragmatics, syntax, cognitive science, linguistic theories and grammatical architecture, language and logic, computational linguistics and psycholinguistics.

With the assistance of a FASS Research Award, Asudeh recently completed and published his monograph, entitled The Logic of Pronominal Resumption.  The Logic of Pronominal Resumption — which is a thoroughly revised version of Asudeh’s Stanford doctoral thesis — investigates the fundamental issue in semantic theory: ‘compositionality’.

Compositionality concerns how the meanings of the parts of an expression, where the parts are smaller expressions or ultimately words, are used to compute the meanings of the expression in its entirety. The key intuition behind compositionality is that certain expressions can be thought of as missing parts that are completed by other expressions.

The Logic of Pronominal Resumption investigates a particular phenomenon – found in languages such as Irish, Hebrew, and Swedish (a language Asudeh is fluent in) – in which a ‘resumptive pronoun’ apparently completes an expression that needs to remain incomplete in order to combine with another expression. Resumptive pronouns are thus a problem for compositionality. For example, the Irish equivalent of ‘the man to whom you gave the money’ is the equivalent of ‘the man that you gave the money to him’. However, ‘you gave the money to him’ is a fully complete sentence and it is therefore puzzling, from the perspective of standard theories of compositionality, how it could be predicated of a subject in, e.g., ‘James is the man that you gave the money to him’. Normally, this can only be accomplished if the meaning of ‘James’ completes the information contributed as the meaning of ‘to’, but the pronoun seems to illicitly be doing this instead.

Asudeh emphasizes the importance of resolving the tension behind compositionality and resumption, because, as he explains, resumption is not uncommon in the world’s languages.

“Resumption is a relatively common phenomenon and occurs furthermore in languages that are not historically related, such as Irish and Hebrew. It therefore must reflect some kind of deep fact about the human language capacity. In addition to expanding our understanding of the relationship between syntax and semantics, resumption gives insight into the relationship between morphology (word formation and the forms of words) and syntax and semantics, because in language after language that displays resumption, the resumptive forms are just ordinary pronominal forms.”

Another reason this book is important:  it is the first major monograph devoted to the process of resumption in more than thirty years.  Asudeh is keeping his fingers crossed that this publication will get people talking about this revealing topic.

“I hope that the Logic of Pronominal Resumption will renew interest in the topic and, through its use of computational logic and its proposal of a processing model for resumption, further strengthen the ties between linguistics, philosophy, computer science, and psychology, thus contributing to cognitive science.”

Asudeh is already engaged in two other major projects. He and Professor Ida Toivonen (ICS/SLaLS) are working with Professor Joan Bresnan (Stanford) and Professor Stephen Wechsler (University of Texas, Austin) on the second edition of Bresnan’s influential advanced syntax textbook, to be published by Wiley-Blackwell later in the year.

He is also working on a project with Dr. Gianluca Giorgolo, a postdoctoral fellow in ICS, on applying concepts from category theory, a branch of mathematics and theoretical computer science, to certain problems at the interface between semantics and pragmatics.

For now, it is Asudeh’s wish that his monograph will resume the debate on pronominal resumption.

For more information on Ash Asudeh

For more details on The Logic of Pronominal Resumption

As children, we are always told to use our imaginations. As we grow older though, very few of us think about what our imagination entails. Carleton University cognitive science professor Jim Davies has made it his challenge to figure out how the imagination works. Davies studies how our imaginations place objects in imagined scenes, even though many of those objects are not in the original suggestion. For example, if you are asked to imagine a “dog,” you might also imagine a collar.

His research focuses on the images that people can create with their imagination. He questions how people create an image when given a topic, knowing which objects to include and where the objects go in the actual image. He suggests that our capability to imagine an image is related to our visual memory. That is, we imagine things as we see them in real life. For example, when picturing someone walking a dog, the dog is generally standing upright on the ground potentially attached to a leash. We very rarely picture the dog upside down or floating in the air because we do not experience that in reality.

The human imagination can be studied through different techniques. One can describe the image that they have created or draw what they have imagined. Eye tracking technology and reaction time testing are also used to understand how people imagine and where they place objects in the image. Davies is also working to create computer programs that imagine the same way people do. He has a computer program that uses over fifty thousand labelled images, and finds the probabilities of what other objects will appear with a particular query object. This program allows us to better understand the relationship between things that we connect in our imaginations.

This study is funded by NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) and undergraduate and graduate students alike work with Davies in the labs to better understand the human imagination.

Hirotani, director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience: Language and Brain (CCN.LaB), is looking for volunteers to participate in research that will help scientists understand how brain structure and wiring changes and evolves with age.

Volunteers must be between the ages of 55 – 65 years, native English speakers with no history of speaking or hearing difficulty or a sign of neurological disorder. Participants must also be right-handed.

While this last requirement may seem odd, right or left handedness is controlled by the brain’s hemispheres. In this case, Hirotani and her team of researchers will be zeroing in on the left side of the brain which controls both language and the right side of the body.

Participants will be asked to listen to computer generated sounds and then respond to the sounds they hear using a gamepad. The experiment itself is a half hour long, although volunteers will spend a total of two hours in the lab for preparation and de-briefing.

If you meet the criteria and are interested in volunteering please contact carleton.ca/lbl

A new state-of-the-art language and brain lab that combines linguistics, psychology and neuroscience is conducting unique research on how people acquire and process language.

Masako Hirotani, director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience: Language and Brain (CCN.LaB) is using the Japanese language, or Kanji, to determine how our brain visually processes language.

Biological coding allows our brains to interpret wildly diverse languages. Yet, some of the processes by which we react to both the English alphabet and Japanese symbols is the same.

“When we are reading, our eyes skip simple words or characters but stop at more complex ones,” said Hirotani. “Do they skip because of visual simplicity or because of the language itself?”

The study of language processing helps linguists and cognitive scientists understand how the brain works, and more specifically which areas of the brain do what. Recent research has discovered that chemical changes in the brain allow it to evolve after puberty, giving hope for rehabilitative therapies for people who have suffered brain trauma such as strokes.

Kanji also convey information about sound and meaning. Future research will focus on how the brain processes these factors.

A call for more brains…

The lab is looking for native Japanese speakers, between the ages of 18 and 40, who have completed three years of high school in Japan.

Volunteers will read sentences presented on a computer monitor while their eye-movements are being recorded by an eye-tracker to determine the eye’s unconscious movements.
To participate contact http://www.carleton.ca/lbl

Lindsey Fraser is helping to make everyday products a little less bewildering to use. The fourth-year cognitive science student has spent the summer interning at a local design firm.

In her position as a usability consultant at Akendi, a design consulting company, Fraser worked on everything from websites to workspaces, products to services.  These otherwise diverse projects are linked by a common goal – to be user-friendly.

Fraser likes the variety she has encountered on the job. “I’ve written and edited reports for clients, researched academic findings, synthesized the results of our own user research and presented design recommendations directly to clients,” she said. “I do quite a bit of actual design work too.”

As part of her major in cognitive science, she has studied human perception, pattern recognition, and models of attention and memory. Understanding these systems and applying them in design can allow users to intuitively grasp how to operate products without cumbersome instruction manuals.  Fraser compares the simplicity of the iPad to the impossibly complex VCRs of the past.

“I don’t think I would have understood the connection between the research, and the design process if I hadn’t had the opportunity to work in a place which so neatly ties them together,” said Fraser. “Co-op gave me a chance to work with a professional consulting firm with an international clientele; and I saw that cognitive science and psychology are incredibly versatile fields with many applications outside the lab.”

Carleton’s Co-op program provides students with an opportunity to develop work skills and acquire relevant industry experience by alternating work placements with periods of study. Co-op options are available to students of sociology, anthropology and cognitive science. For more information about Carleton’s co-op program visit http://www.carleton.ca/co-op

This year, the Departments of History and French have added a co-op option to their programs.  For information about these options visit http://carleton.ca/co-op/news/french-history-co-op-information-sessions/

“Languages are essential for communicating with each other,” notes Dr. Masako Hirotani, director of the new Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience: Language and Brain (CCN.LaB). “So if we can better understand how we learn to speak and understand a language, then we will be able to do all kinds of things like help stroke victims, children who are struggling to learn a language and people who are learning how to speak a second language.”

The lab features three small rooms. One contains an EEG machine that will allow researchers to study brainwave patterns when people use language. A second room is equipped with an EyeLink 1000 eye-tracker that records readers’ eye movements every millisecond. The eye-tracker is hooked up to two computers that will read and analyze the data. In a third room, researchers will record conversations that will allow them to study the acoustic nature of human speech, as well as conduct behavioural experiments using both conversations and auditory stimuli.

Hirotani, an assistant professor of linguistics and cognitive science based in SLaLS, says:  “We’ll be playing detective using different techniques and sensitive equipment that marry the fields of linguistics, psychology and neuroscience in order to help solve the problem of how we acquire and process language. This could lead to breakthroughs in speech audiology and pathology, which could result in more effective reading intervention programs to help people with dyslexia and other reading disorders.”

“The Language and Brain lab will add an important and exciting dimension to a school already known for its impressive variety of research into the nature of language and its use,” says Randall Gess, director of SLaLS. “The new work on language processing and language development will complement leading work on structural properties of language ranging from the semantics of Cree to the phonetics of Inari Saami, and functional aspects of language ranging from blogging and virtual community in the Kurdish diaspora to the use of language by major powers in the climate change debates.”

Missed the opening, but still want the tour?  Take a virtual tour of the lab.

The lab cost just over $344,000 and was funded by grants from the Canada Foundation for Innovation (CFI), the Ministry of Research and Innovation and four “in-kind” contributors.

The Canadian Psychoanalytic Society is the national organization of psychoanalysts in or from Canada who are members of and thereby licensed by the International Psychoanalytic Association. The IPA was founded by the British members of Freud’s group in 1910. Most Canadian psychoanalysts are physicians or clinical psychologists. Some are social workers and a small number are members of faculty in the humanities and social sciences. 

The president-elect is selected by National Council every two years according to a complex formula designed to ensure that both official languages and all regions are represented over the space of a number of years. The term is two years as president-elect, two years as president, and two years as past-president.