Distinguished Lectures in Humanities : Neuroscience in the Wild : the Neurocognitive Computation of Naturalistic Conversation

The human brain is a hierarchical prediction system capable of processing complex social and linguistic information in everyday life. However, little is known about how we infer others' semantic meaning and communicative intentions during naturalistic conversation, and how we utilize such inferences to facilitate teaching and learning in the real classroom. Our results revealed an active inference process to generate candidate utterances and then select the optimal one by integrating pragmatic predictions with prediction errors, thereby enhancing the activation of the target utterance. Hyperscanning data supported this model, revealing a hierarchical neural architecture processing both predictions about the partner and prediction errors. Furthermore, we demonstrated how this social interaction mechanism supports observational learning in children at home and facilitates knowledge construction among students in the real classroom.
Event date: 5/2/2026
Speaker: Prof. Chunming LU
Hosted by: Faculty of Humanities