Latest Past Events

POSTPONED: Alican Mertan (University of Vermont), “Morphological Cognition: Evolving Robots Exhibiting Cognitive Behavior without Abstract Controllers”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

With the rise of modern deep learning, neural networks have become an essential part of virtually every artificial intelligence system, making it difficult to imagine different models for intelligent behavior. In contrast, nature provides us with many different mechanisms for intelligent behavior, most of which we have yet to utilize. One such underinvestigated aspect of

Jacob Yates (UC Berkeley), “The Role of Motor Signals in Visual Cortex”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Embodiment is fundamental to biological intelligence. Brains do not passively receive the world, they actively shape what they sense through self-motion. For nearly a century, we have known that perception and action are deeply entangled, and that organisms must constantly infer whether a sensory change comes from the environment or from themselves. A longstanding idea

Matthias Nau (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), “Revealing General Principles Underlying Active Vision and Memory”

SCIoI, Marchstraße 23, 10587 Berlin, Room 2.057

Abstract: Cognitive neuroscience seeks theories that jointly explain behavioral, neural, and mental states. The dominant approach is to use specialized tasks designed to optimally probe a concept of interest (e.g., episodic memory), and to disentangle behavioral, sensory, and mnemonic factors through design (e.g., by constraining gaze during image recognition). I will present an alternative framework