The Asian Cultural Evolution (ACE) seminar series invites new participants. This series is organized by Kenji Itao, Xinyue Pan, and Wataru Toyokawa with the aim to strengthen the international network of researchers studying cultural evolution, with a particular focus on (but not limited to) scholars based in Asia and Pacific regions.

For now, they plan to hold seminars on a bimonthly basis. The seminars will take place online on the third Tuesday of every odd-numbered month at 19:00 JST (18:00 Perth/Singapore/Beijing, 19:00 Tokyo/Seoul, 20:00 Sydney). Researchers and students from any field related to cultural evolution are welcome, including anthropology, social psychology, economics, mathematical biology, informatics, complex systems theory, and more.

To receive regular updates about the seminars, you can join their mailing list by sending a blank email to [email protected]. Information about each seminar is sent through the mailing list.  Members are encouraged to share this opportunity with anyone who might be interested.

The next session will be:

Date: March 18th, 19:00-20:30 (JST)

Start times in other time zones:
 • 18:00 (Perth/Singapore/Beijing)
 • 19:00 (Tokyo/Seoul)
 • 20:00 (Sydney)

Speaker: Lusha Zhu (Peking University)

Title: Mental representation and decision-making in an interconnected world

Abstract: Social networks shape our beliefs and choices by constraining what information we receive and from whom. Yet the mechanism by which the human brain interacts with networked environments remains unclear. Two computational challenges stand out when we try to learn from interconnected peers. First, information flowing along network connections is typically interdependent and varies in its informativeness. So how does the brain effectively integrate network-derived information? Second, individuals can hardly take into account the topological structure of the entire network when interacting with it. So which social connections are considered and which are ignored, how will the streamlined network representation affect our perception and navigation of the social world? In this talk, I will present a series of recent work that uses lab experiment on simulated networks, computational modeling, and fMRI to investigate social network-related learning and representation. Our finding unifies a variety of seemingly disparate biases in social perception and decision-making, shedding light on the cognitive roots of some important societal conundrums, such as biased social sensing and misinformation propagation.