CRBLM distinguished lecture: Dr. Jean-Remi King (Psychology, NYU)

Title: Identifying the neural architecture of human cognition with machine learning and neuroimaging.

Date: Wednesday, November 22, 10:00am
Location: Goodman Cancer Research Centre, 1160 Pine Ave W, Montreal, Room 501

The room can be accessed from the McGill Life Sciences complex entrance on 3649 promenade Sir William Osler. Take the elevator to the 5th floor, when exiting the elevator turn right and walk all the way to the end of the hallway. The room can also be accessed from Pine Ave.

Abstract: What computations are specific to human cognition? Are they supported by a particular neural architecture? Here, I will argue that the recent developments in 1) artificial intelligence and 2) temporally-resolved neuroimaging offer a new opportunity to address these foundational issues. In particular, I will show how we can track the unfolding of complex hierarchical processes, such as those supporting perceptual decision making and speech comprehension, and reveal the representations that the human brain encodes, selects, and maintains at each instant in time. The present studies show that brain activity can be automatically decomposed into a multitude of parallel, serial and recursive processing stages that can be directly compared and contrasted to Bayesian and deep neural networks. The present studies outline promising research directions to parse the recursive computations responsible for syntactic processing and conceptual composition and pave the way to integrate the disciplines of biological and artificial cognition.