3 February 2020 (Monday) | 16h00 - 19h00
Sala do Departamento de Filosofia (Torre B – Piso 1)

Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto

What’s in that Face?
Prediction and Emotion in Perception

Prof. Ophelia DEROY – LMU Munich
Prof. Fernando FERREIRA- SANTOS – University of Porto

PROGRAM

16:00 – 17:00 – Prof. Ophelia DEROY (LMU Munich) – ‘Can we counteract our own racial biases?’

The same skin colour, when embedded on different morphologies, will look darker or lighter. The effect of our long-term associations and predictions on what we perceive, though optimal in some respects, lead then to robust perceptual biases that we would want to eliminate : Either these biases seem to have bad consequences, or be based on wrong generalisations. Philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have highlighted the automaticity of these biases, but rarely questioned what we can do about them. Here I will present recent experimental work, where we tested the access and corrective control that we have on the face-lightness biases, and show which general lessons it tells for the role of predictions in perception, and for our responsibility toward our own biases.

17:00 – 17:15 – Coffee break

17:15 – 18:15 – Prof. Fernando FERREIRA-SANTOS (University of Porto) – ‘Predictive Processing and Emotion: Computing value and uncertainty?’

Despite enormous progress in the field of Affective Science, the nature of emotion remains, to some extent, as elusive as when William James inquired "What is an emotion?" in 1884. In this talk I will consider how the recent conceptual and empirical advances that fall under the broad framework of Predictive Processing may contribute towards a computationally tractable approach to the study of emotional and affective processes.

Specifically, I will consider the computational role of affect as a function of value and uncertainty in the modulation of the neural interplay between predictions and prediction-errors that is characteristic of Predictive Processing.

18:15 – 18:45 – General Discussion

Organisers:
Dr. Anna Ciaunica, Prof. Sofia Miguens, Diana Couto – contact: anna.ciaunica@gmail.com

Research Group Mind Language and Action Group (MLAG)
Instituto de Filosofia da Universidade do Porto - FIL/00502
Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)
U.Porto e Banco Santander - Programa Santander Universidades