Conférence de Michael Ramscar : "Nonlinear dynamics of lifelong learning: the myth of cognitive decline" (9h30-10h30)
As adults age, their performance on a range of psychometric tests declines. This has been taken to show that cognitive information-processing capacities also decline with age. I will present a series of linguistic analyses, experiments that all point to the same conclusion: that the patterns of slowing / "forgetting" – and non-slowing / "non-forgetting" – seen in healthy adults simply reflect the consequences of learning from the statistical distributions that typify much of human experience. I will further show how erroneous beliefs about cognitive decline are perpetuated by the flawed measures currently used to measure "cognitive performance" across the lifespan. Using simulations based on very large data samples, I'll show how the patterns of test performance usually labeled as "decline" emerge in learning models as the range of knowledge that they acquire increases. The simulations correctly identify greater variation in the cognitive performance of older adults, and successfully predict that older adults exhibit much greater sensitivity to fine-grained differences in the properties of test items than younger adults, as well as correctly identifying circumstances in which age effects can negated or even reversed.
Conférence de Camille Frouin : "Tell me a word, I'll tell you how old you are" (11h00-12h00)
Alzheimer’s disease is a neurodegenerative pathology whose lesions generate cognitive decline. A language simplification can be observed in AD patients. Based on the connectionist theories on the one hand, and the retrogenesis hypothesis on the second hand, I will present some works to argue the reliable and relevant use of words age of acquisition (AoA) as a tool to observe language. Indeed, the semantic memory is a complex and organised structure in which all our knowledge about the world is stored. We all have our own “semantic network” since it is shaped depending on our life experience, our concerns and on the connexions we create between each concept. Interviewing someone’s semantic memory can tell us many things about its inner structure. I will present the factors that may affect its organization (e.g. frequency, familiarity) as well as what it can reveal in a lifespan perspective, from language development to language attrition in Alzheimer’s disease.
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