Patrick Haggard (UCL)
Date: Wednesday, January 14, 2014 - 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Frankel Leó út 30-34., Room G15
Voluntary action and social responsibility
Abstract:
Our social culture provides a dualist concept of action: it assumes that the conscious mind decides on our actions, that we could therefore have chosen alternative actions to those we did choose, and that we are therefore responsible for what we have done. This talk will examine two key questions about voluntary action from a neuroscientific point of view. First, I will discuss how the brain's capacity for voluntary action is related to conscious awareness. I will show that conscious experience is a product of brain activity that precedes action, and not a cause of it. In the second part of the talk, I will consider how a mechanistic, neuroscientific account of voluntary action might relate to the essential social concept of individual responsibility.
Title: Investigating the sensorimotor basis of human communication
Abstract: Disembodied automated systems cannot reach human-like performance when dealing with the decoding of human non-verbal communicative signals. Automated systems, in fact, rarely exploit human brain/body solutions. All attempts that do not take this fact into account are bound to be unreliable in variable environments, to fail in generalizing to new examples and to be unable to scale up to solve more complex problems. For this very reason, I will first report basic neurophysiological studies dedicated to the description of the basic mechanisms of inter-individual sensorimotor communication. I will then move to the discussion of current attempts to quantify sensorimotor information flow among interacting participant and finally propose a roadmap to build better computational tools to decode human sensorimotor communication.
- See more at: http://cognitivescience.ceu.hu/events/2014-12-03/departmental-colloquium-alessandro-dausilio-iit-istituto-italiano-di-tecnologia-0#sthash.oJdk9jyf.dpuf