NEWS ARCHIVE

🗓️ 16 October 2026, 11:45 AM
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG): Room D-5
🔓 Open for all

Join us for a thought-provoking talk about the nature of our dialogic knowledge of the language. The talk will deal with the complex nature of spontaneous dialogic communication, as the most direct window into knowledge of the language and as a unique cognitive challenge.

Our guest lecturer is Mirjam Fried, a renowned cognitive linguist and construction grammarian. Mirjam Fried teaches cognitive linguistics at the Faculty of Arts at Charles University (CU FA) in Prague, having previously taught at UC Berkeley, University of Oregon, and Princeton University. She’s the co-founder of the book series Constructional Approaches to Language (John Benjamins, 2000) and the journal Constructions and Frames (John Benjamins, 2009) and she has recently coedited the Cambridge Handbook of Construction Grammar (CUP 2025, with K. Nikiforidou). She’s been one of the leading proponents of the constructional approach, developing the analytic potential of Construction Grammar in areas beyond pure syntax.

Everyone is welcome!

Our alumni, students and guests gathered to celebrate the promotion of the Program’s first generation. For some it was the culmination of an academic life; for others a rite of passage to new ranks and new challenges.

We celebrate with them, with great pride in their trailblazing efforts for those who follow.

The teaching timetable for the winter semester of 2026/2027 is now on the site, for the first and third semester.

Every session carries its hours, its room and the faculty it is taught at, and every course links to its own page. The spreadsheet can be downloaded from the top of the page.

📅 Course schedule

🌟

Rebecca Milosavljević on cognitive biases in large language models — where they come from, and what can be done to reduce them.

Candidate: Rebecca Milosavljević
Title: Analysis of Cognitive Biases in Large Language Models and Methods of Mitigations
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room D303 (ZEMRIS)
📅 Monday, September 28, 2026
🕙10:00 AM

🌟

Two master's theses on self-voice perception: Ana Ivanišević on depersonalization and inner speech, and Jelena Paulić on proneness to hallucination — both asking what it means to recognise a voice as your own.

Candidate: Ana Ivanišević
Title: Self-voice perception, depersonalization, and inner speech: the relationship between SOVD task results and measures of depersonalization and the phenomenology of inner speech
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room D-160
📅 Friday, September 25, 2026
🕙12:00 PM

Candidate: Jelena Paulić
Title: Self-Voice Perception And Its Relationship With Hallucination Proneness
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room D-160
📅 Friday, September 25, 2026
🕙12:30 PM

🌟

Four master's theses to be defended probe human cognition across its interfaces with other people, artificial intelligence, everyday reasoning tools, and the body itself — from the pull of the majority, to trust in robots, to the logic behind "girl math," to how cognitive fatigue and the autonomic nervous system shape quality of life in multiple sclerosis.

Candidate: Katarina Ivić
Title: How Much Do We Think Before Following the Majority? Cognitive and Affective Determinants of the ‘Bandwagon’ Effect
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A303
📅 Wednesday, September 16, 2026
🕙10:00 AM

Candidate: Vanja Zvonar
Title: Can We Trust a Robot? Cognitive Styles and Evaluation of Artificial Agents
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A303
📅 Monday, September 21, 2026
🕙10:00 AM

Candidate: Dijana Milek
Title: Beyond Gender: Understanding the Cognitive Basis of the Girl Math Phenomenon
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A303
📅 Monday, September 21, 2026
🕙11:30 AM

Candidate: Lara Puhovski
Title: The Relationship Between Physical Activity and Quality of Life in Individuals with Multiple Sclerosis: The Mediating Roles of Autonomic Symptoms and Cognitive Fatigue
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room D-160
📅 Friday, September 25, 2026
🕙1:00 PM

🌟

The Center for Cognitive Science joins Visage Technologies and the University of Rijeka's Faculty of Maritime Studies in Research and Development of a new platform for adaptive learning and training.

Learning outcomes hinge on a trainee's cognitive-affective state as much as on the content or instruction itself. Grounded in affective computing, the platform fuses camera, microphone, and wearable-device physiological signals into real-time estimates of cognitive load, engagement, and arousal, then adapts instructional content and simulation scenarios to match.

First piloted in maritime training simulation, the architecture is built to generalize across learning domains — putting cognitive modeling at the core of the next generation of educational technology.

📅 2026–2029, EU co-funded.

🌟

A few new titles have come into the library, spanning cognitive linguistics, machine consciousness, and Persian language pedagogy.

Fictive Interaction: The Conversation Frame in Thought, Language, and Discourse — Esther Pascual Olivé
Spaces, Worlds, and Grammar — ed. Gilles Fauconnier & Eve Sweetser
The Illusion Engine: The Quest for Machine Consciousness — Kristina Šekrst
Handbook of Teaching and Learning Persian as a Second Language — ed. Hooman Saeli
The Routledge Handbook of Second Language Acquisition and Pedagogy of Persian — ed. Pouneh Shabani-Jadidi
Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems — Leonard Talmy

More titles are on their way.

🌟

These three master's theses reflect the remarkable breadth of interdisciplinary inquiry at the heart of cognitive science, ranging from the philosophy of perception and aesthetics to consumer psychology and the linguistics of humour. The mind, they remind us, is best understood by drawing together diverse fields: from predictive processing and artificial intelligence to decision-making and pragmatics.

Candidate: Mirna Bašić
Title: Predictive processing on aesthetic experience and AI art
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A216
📅 Thursday, June 2, 2026
🕙11:00 AM

Candidate: Mara Krnić
Title: Analysis of Consumer Attitudes and Informedness: How Informed is Decision-Making in AI-Driven Consumer Environments?
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A216
📅 Monday, June 6, 2026
🕙4:30 PM

Candidate: Neven Zenko
Title: Frame Shift in Satire: A Multidisciplinary Perspective
📍 Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences (FFZG), Room A216
📅 Tuesday, June 7, 2026
🕙11:00 AM

🌟

Candidate: Luka List
Title: From Deep Visual Features to Cognitive Concepts: Attribution-Based Explanations of Predicted fMRI Responses During Naturalistic Movie Viewing
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room ZESOI (knjižnica zavoda)
📅 Tuesday, May 12, 2026
🕙12:15 PM

🌟

How do we know whether brain parcels truly preserve meaningful structure during rich, naturalistic stimulation? Bartol Banić tackles this question in a master’s thesis exploring the dynamics of Schaefer parcellation under multimodal film‑based input.

Candidate: Bartol Banić
Title: From signal structure to functional attribution: an examination of Schaefer Parcel dynamics under multimodal naturalistic stimulation
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room ZESOI (knjižnica zavoda)
📅 Tuesday, March 24, 2026
🕙1:00 PM

This thesis offers a rigorous, multi‑method examination of parcel‑level neural signal organization, shedding light on the conditions under which functional attribution in neuroimaging becomes scientifically defensible. 🌟

How can large language models support older adults through conversational assistants? Luka Prpić explores this important question in his master’s thesis defense.

Candidate: Luka Prpić
Title: Application of Large Language Models for Developing a Chatbot Assistant for Older Adults: Technical and Psychological Aspects of Interaction
📍 Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing (FER), Room A-111
📅 Thursday, November 27, 2025
🕙3:30 PM

Luka’s thesis offers a valuable perspective on the intersection of advanced AI technology and human‑centered design, contributing to both technical innovation and the psychology of digital interaction. 🌟