Philippe G. Schyns (University of Glasgow)
Date: Wednesday, December 17, 2014 - 17:00-18:30
Location: Department of Cognitive Science, CEU, Frankel Leó út 30-34., Room G15
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.dpufTitle: Information Processing Decoded from Behavioral and Brain Responses
Abstract: If the brain is a machine that processes information, then its cognitive activity can be interpreted as a set of information processing states linking stimulus to response (i.e. as a mechanism or an algorithm). The cornerstone of this research agenda is the existence of a method to translate the measurable states of behavioral and brain activity into the information processing states of a cognitive theory. Here, I contend that reverse correlation methods can provide this translation. I will illustrate, using examples from visual cognition, how this novel framework can be applied to start understanding the information processing algorithms of the brain in cognitive neuroscience.