Minding the News

Sponsored by the MIT Imagination, Computation, and Expression Laboratory (ICE Lab)

See Part 1 of this series, from September 6, featuring Francis Steen.

The Red Hen Lab is a distributed laboratory for the study of network news. In an earlier talk, Professor Francis Steen provided a technical overview of the activities of Red Hen and surveyed the study by Francis Steen and Mark Turner of international network news coverage of the Anders Bering Brevik event in Oslo, Norway, in July, 2011, with an emphasis on the way in which network news is occupied with the assessment of culpability, blame, and credit.

This talk will discuss research on the cognitive underpinnings of network news, with an emphasis on blended joint attention, story-telling, counterfactuality, and hypotheticals.

Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Professor of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University.

He is the founding director of the Cognitive Science Network. His most recent book publications are Ten Lectures on Mind and Language and two edited volumes, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, and Meaning, Form, & Body, edited with Fey Parrill and Vera Tobin. His other publications include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society, The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language, and many more. He has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Advanced Study of Durham University. He is a fellow of the Institute for the Science of Origins, external research professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, distinguished fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology, and Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftsliches Zentrum. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises. For 2011-2012, he is a fellow of the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.