Humans build their intelligence by integrating new information with what they already know. The order in which information is presented can affect how it is processed.

In a free public lecture Thursday entitled “Order Effects, Moral Cognition, and Intelligence,” philosophy professor Marcello Guarini will compare two artificial neural networks that classify moral situations: one subject to these “order effects” and another that is not subject to them.

“The network subject to order effects has advantages in learning and noise tolerance over the other—features hard to ignore in modeling intelligence,” he says.

Dr. Guarini is a fellow of the Centre for Research in Reasoning, Argumentation and Rhetoric, which is sponsoring his talk. The event begins at 4 p.m. November 21 in room 209, Essex Hall.