Individual differences | Dr. Holly E.A. Sutherland

God, Language, and Diversity

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The use of language pervades every aspect of life within the Judeo-Christian faith traditions. The importance of language inreligion and ethics is well known, but the remarkable diversity of languages and types of speakers within religious communities has been overlooked. Such neglect undermines current understanding because linguistic diversity is at the heart of many religious practices (e.g., using multiple languages in worship, training participants to interpret texts in unusual ways, and violating norms of communication to speak with a transcendent God). Implicit with such practices is the intriguing idea that linguistic diversity increases our ability to speak faithfully to and about God and that a linguistically diverse community is more likely to be a spiritually flourishing community.

This project investigates the relationship between linguistic diversity, religious language, and human flourishing by bringing together ten theologians, psychologists, and cognitive scientists to run five distinct, but coordinated, research projects. The Cambridge arm of the grant will be focused on illuminating classical rabbinic forms of text-interpretation by comparison to language acquisition in child development and in neurodivergent individuals. In particular, we are exploring the rabbinic practice of uncovering multiple ‘creative’ readings of scriptural texts.

At the University of Cambridge, September 2024 to September 2026. The Cambridge arm of the project has Dr. Daniel Weiss and Prof. Napoleon Katsos as Co-PIs. Funded by the John Templeton Foundation.

How to (Re)represent it?

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

“The aim of this project is to identify and study how humans represent information that they want to work with and from which they will obtain new knowledge. Humans have the capability to choose the representation that is just right for them to enable them to solve a new problem, and moreover, if the representation needs to be changed, they can spot this and change it. Unlike humans, machines in general have fixed representations and do not have the understanding of the user. For example, sat-nav systems will only give directions with elementary spatial commands or route planning functions, whereas humans give directions in many forms, for instance in terms of landmarks or other geographic features that are based on shared knowledge.

We want to model in computational systems this inherently human ability to choose or change appropriate representations, and make machines do the same. We want to find out what are the cognitive processes that humans use to select representations, what criteria they use to choose them, and how we can model this ability on machines.” -rep2rep

As part of this role, I developed cognitive profiling measures to assess individual differences in diagram comprehension, and deployed them to 100+ participants via online survey. My other outputs for this project (alongside conference papers and journal articles) included a novel diagram taxonomy; an AI system prototype; behavioural coding scheme.

At the University of Sussex, in collaboration with the University of Cambridge, September 2018 to September 2019. Funded by the EPSRC (EP/R030650/1 and EP/R030642/1)."

Correspondence-based analogies for choosing problem representations

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Dissecting representations

Sat, 01 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Cross-domain Correspondences for Explainable Recommendations

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Inspection and Selection of Representations

Mon, 01 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Elucidating the Cognitive Anatomy of Representation Systems

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 00:00:00 +0000