Dr. Lucija Peterlin Masic of the University of Ljubljana

Ethanol is one of the most widely used legal psychoactive substances with high potential for abuse. Interactions between ethanol and drugs may occur with the concurrent use of ethanol and medicinal products. The elderly frequently use ethanol and prescription drugs together; therefore the risk for side effects is higher. Concomitant use of ethanol and drugs may result in pharmacokinetic or pharmacodynamic interactions. Pharmacokinetic interactions occur when ethanol directly affects the normal metabolism of the drug and its concentration in the blood. Pharmacodynamic interactions are primarily the result of additive effects of ethanol and drugs on the central nervous system. Therefore, there is a risk of excessive sedation when using drugs that act depressive on the central nervous system. In reality, interactions between ethanol and drugs are often complex, as people may be exposed to more than two psychotropic substances at the same time. In the presentation, I will focus primarily on action of the ethanol on the organism and on providing a better insight into the mechanisms underlying the known pharmacokinetic and pharmacodynamic drug interactions with ethanol.

Dr. Dominique Vuvan of Skidmore College

Music is an incredible tool for the study of human cognition. This lecture will review work from the Skidmore Music and Cognition Lab guided by three lines of inquiry. First, how does the cognitive system make predictions, and how might different musical contexts shape predictions during listening? Second, how might music serve as a model to investigate the neural substrates of consciousness? Third, how do people differ in their musical processing, and how might the study of these individual differences help us understand neurocognitive function more generally? I will discuss research that employs multiple methods including behavioural measurement, event-related potentials, and brain imaging, in order to make direct connections between the study of musical processing to more abstract questions about human nature.

Jayden Ziegler of Harvard University

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages (like English) typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., crab-walking), others (like Spanish) more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., entering). These tendencies lead to biases in learning: children and adults assume that novel motion verbs will reflect the dominant pattern of their own language (manner for English, path for Spanish). Moreover, these biases are flexible: when taught a series of novel motion verbs that all encode path, English speakers will shift to expecting that subsequent verbs will encode path instead of manner. In this talk, I’ll address some limitations of this work (in English) and extend it to new languages: Chinese, Portuguese, and Spanish. I'll conclude by discussing the implications of these results for the architecture of language in the mind.