Crick Lecture, February 20th, Dr. John Layer, University of Evansville

"How We 'Think and Feel', Does It Matter?" 4:00-5:00, KC 100.

How we perform is largely affected by how we “think and feel” about matters concerning our immediate environment at a particular point in time. A relevant question of instructors, students, workers, and managers is how performance can be maximized in their immediate environment. The pace of technological change has quickened to a point where the human cognitive capacity to perceive, assimilate, decide, and to take action on a task-related issue has required the acceptance of the condition of change as not only inevitable, but also necessary. This process of change confounds the already complex feedback loop that exists between us and our socio-technical environment. This presentation will summarize an ecological model that depicts the interaction of performance, our ever-changing environment, and how we “think and feel” about the tasks at hand.

Crick Lecture, April 16th, Mr. Trent Kriete, University of California, Merced

"Autism and the Brain." 4:00-5:00, KC 100. 

Autism is an extremely diverse and complex developmental disorder which is believed to be neurobiological in origin. The amazing complexity of behavior, coupled with the implication of nearly the entire brain in people with autism, has made the isolation of the precise neurological deficit extremely difficult! Computational models containing sufficient biological detail may be able to help us better understand the links between brains and behavior in people with autism. I will provide a survey of the current state of theorizing about behavior in autism, as well as examples showing how formalizing underlying brain differences in computational models may provide interesting insights into the disorder.