Goldsmiths - University of London

Lent 2011

4pm Wednesday January 26th

Towards and affective neuro-physio-phenomenology

Dr. Giovanna Colombetti 
Department of Sociology & Philosophy at the University of Exeter 

ABSTRACT: The neuroscientific study of emotion experience has been neglected compared to other aspects of consciousness. Affective neuroscience is still largely dominated by a behaviouristic paradigm that focuses on the link between emotional stimuli, neural, bodily and/or behavioural responses. To rectify this situation, I propose to augment affective neuroscience with the neurophenomenological method originally delineated by Varela (1996) to combine first-, second- and third-person methods in the study of consciousness. I argue that this integration will enrich affective neuroscience as well as neurophenomenology itself, given that the latter has not yet been applied to emotion experience, and has focused exclusively on the brain in spite of its association with the “enactive” view of the mind. Integrating neurophenomenology with affective neuroscience will extend the neurophenomenological method to the rest of the organism (hence the proposed label “affective neuro-physio-phenomenology”), enabling us better to understand how lived experience relates to physical processes.

BRIEF BIO: Dr. Colombetti is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the Department of Sociology & Philosophy at the University of Exeter. Her main research interests include embodied and enactive approaches in philosophy of mind and cognitive science, and philosophical and scientific theories of emotion. She is currently working on a 5-year project funded by the ERC (European Research Council) to bridge these two fields of inquiry. Among others she has co-edited with Evan Thompson a special issues of the Journal of Consciousness Studies on "Emotion Experience". Dr. Colombetti is currently working on a manuscript provisionally titled "The Feeling Body: Emoting the Embodied Mind".

Wednesday 2 February, 4 pm

Do we need consciousness for control?

Magda Osman, Lecturer, Biological and Experimental Psychology Centre, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, Queen Mary University of London
E-mail: m.osman@qmul.ac.uk

ABSTRACT: Dynamic control environments (e.g., car driving, medical decision making, playing the stock market, operating nuclear power plants) involve goal directed decision making. That is, the decision maker chooses actions that
generate outcomes that build on previous decisions in order to work towards achieving a final desirable state of the environment. The problem inherent in dynamic control environments is that the decision maker must
learn to isolate the occasions in which their actions change the observed events (direct effects – slowing the spread of disease through drug intervention) from those occasions in which the changes in the environment are autonomous (indirect effects – variable rate of spread of disease). When faced with such complex decision making environments, psychological studies often report a dissociation between people's ability to improve their control of the task environment, and their failure to provide accurate verbal descriptions of their task knowledge. I will present evidence from a series of laboratory studies showing that people do have conscious access to their decision making behaviors and, crucially meta-cognitive processes actually guide control behaviors. I argue that, despite the popularity in the cognitive sciences, there is little evidence to support the claim that control is based on implicit learning.

BRIEF BIO: Dr Osman currently holds the position of Lecturer in Experimental Cognitive Psychology in the Biological and Experimental Psychology Centre, School of Biological and Chemical Sciences, at Queen Mary University of London. She completed by PhD from Brunel University (2001), and was a Senior Research Fellow (2001-2007) at University College London – and currently maintains an honorary position there. Her main research interests are perceptual-motor learning, decision making, reasoning and problem solving. To date, her research is concerned with the underlying mechanisms that support learning and decision making in complex dynamic environments in which people must track the effects of their actions in order to control the changing events around them. In two recent review (Osman, 2010a Psych Bull; Osman, 2010b, Controlling Uncertainty, Wiley-Blackwells) the critical issues related to complex dynamic decision making (e.g. agency, causality, prediction and control) are examined in a variety of disciplines (HCI, Machine Learning, Psychology, Engineering, and Neuroscience).

Prof. Ezequiel di Paolo 
Research Professor at Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science

The mind in-between: Can social interaction constitute social cognition?

ABSTRACT: Recent empirical work in social cognition, both in psychology and neuroscience, has gradually started to focus on situations involving various degrees of social interaction. Such situations are notably difficult to manage in controlled settings. This is one reason behind the prevailing attention to individual cognitive mechanisms for social understanding. However, the "experimental quarantine" (Daniel Richardson's phrase) is being lifted and the focus of empirical studies is increasingly concerned with individuals in interactive situations (e.g., joint action). In this talk, I argue that this move must be followed by a lifting of the "conceptual quarantine", which still in effect and puts the weight of social cognitive performance solely on individual mechanisms (e.g., mirror neurons). This perspective is traceable to the methodological individualism prevalent in cognitive science in general. It is yet another reason that accounts for the widespread conception of social cognition as a detached observation of social situations and exceptionally as a form of participation. The properties of the interaction dynamics are relegated to the role of informational input to individual mechanisms.

In order to conceive of the possibility of social interaction being itself part of the mechanisms of social cognition, it is necessary first to provide a definition of the term able to capture the intuitive notion of engagement. Such definitions are surprisingly rare in the literature. I argue that the enactive definition of social interaction achieves this objective. Following this, the possible roles that interaction could play in particular cases are evaluated according to a scale of increasing involvement by introducing distinctions between contextual factors, enabling conditions and constitutive processes. I discuss existence proofs for all of these options (thus answering the title question positively). The argument carries minimal and maximal implications. At the very least, if the interaction process is admitted to play in some cases a role beyond the contextual, this implies that individual mechanisms (e.g., contingency detection modules, mirror neurons) must be re-conceptualised as mechanisms-in-interaction, and their functional role re-assessed. I discuss evidence that this shift is slowly taking place for the case of mirror neurons. Maximally, if interaction is admitted to sometimes constitute social cognition this opens the door for a broadening of the spectrum of explanations and calls for a program aimed at assessing the contributions of individual and social mechanisms not only for social cognition, but for cognition in general. This talk is based on a recent publication: "De Jaegher, H, Di Paolo, E. A. and Gallagher, S. (2010) Can social interaction constitute social cognition?, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 14(10), 441 - 447. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2010.06.009"

BRIEF BIO: Professor di Paolo is currently research Professor at Ikerbasque, the Basque Foundation for Science, Bilbao, Spain. Ezequiel studied Physics and Mathematics at the Universidad de Buenos Aires and did an MSc in a Nuclear Engineering at the Instituto Balseiro (National Atomic Energy Agency and University of Cuyo). He was awarded a DPhil (PhD) at COGS, Univesity of Sussex, within the Evolutionary and Adaptive Systems group, under the supervision of Prof Phil Husbands. Ezequiel has been a research fellow at the German National Research Center for Information Technology, GMD, in Sankt Augustin within the Autonomous Intelligent Systems (AiS) institute. Ezequiel remains in closely connected with COGS research at Susses, having worked there as a lecturer from 2000, Senior Lecturer and then Reader. He is also affiliated with the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics and the Centre for Research on Cognitive Science.

4pm Wednesday 2nd March

Prof. Peter McOwan  
School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London 

Now you see it, now you don’t? A computational method for automatic stimulus generation for change blindness and visual pop out tasks.

ABSTRACT: Change blindness, where observers have difficulty in perceiving changes between sequentially presented images, and spatial pop put where regions of target textures need to be identified, are useful tools to help explore human visual awareness. In this talk I will present results on work that blends a computational model for image saliency and evolutionary optimization techniques to allow the automatic custom generation of experimental stimuli. The results show that this computational approach is able to predict observer performance in both special pop put and change blindness tasks.

BRIEF BIO: Peter is currently Professor of Computer Science and Director of Outreach in the School of Electronic Engineering and Computer Science at Queen Mary, University of London. His research interests are in visual perception, mathematical models for visual processing, cognitive science and biologically inspired hardware and software. He has authored more than 90 papers in these areas. He recently served on the Program Committee for ACII2009, CVPR 2009 and IEEE Artificial Life and is a member of the editorial board of the Journal on Multimodal User Interfaces. Current research projects include LIREC, an EU FP7 IP, developing long term synthetic companions, an EPSRC programme grant CHI+MED investigating design to reduce human errors in medical software and an EPSRC PPE CS4fn, an outreach project to enthuse schools about computer science research. He was also elected a National Teaching Fellow by the Higher Education Academy in 2008.

4pm Wednesday 9th March

Dr. Victor Becerra 
Department of Cybernetics, University of Reading 

Robot control using living neuronal cells: progress and challenges

ABSTRACT: Typically, mobile robots are controlled by means of an embedded computer. Recent EPSRC funded research has been carried out at the University of Reading in which dissociated biological neurons have been cultured, electrically interfaced, and employed to send commands to a mobile robot, and to receive stimulation derived from the sensors mounted at the robot. In this way, it can be argued that the interfaced neural culture is taking at least part of the role of the controller of the robot. The principal aim of this research project was, by using experiments such as the one described above, to investigate the computational and learning capacity of dissociated neuronal cultures. This seminar provides an overview of the problem area, introduces the breath of ongoing research, and states a number of open questions that may be answered by future research.

BRIEF BIO: Victor Becerra is a Reader in Cybernetics. He has been an academic at Reading since January 2000. He was previously a Research Fellow in the Control Engineering Research Centre at City University, London, between 1994 and 1999. He obtained his PhD in Control Engineering from City University, London, in 1994, for his work in the development of optimal control algorithms. He obtained his BEng in Electrical Engineering from Simon Bolivar University, Venezuela, in 1990.

NB Different day of the week and venue

Tuesday 15 March, 4 pm
NAB LG01

Katsumi Watanabe, Associate Professor of Cognitive Science, Research Centre for Advanced Science and Technology, University of Tokyo, Japan
E-mail: kw@fennel.rcast.u-tokyo.ac.jp

How people look at faces differently

ABSTRACT: Facial processing is considered to be one of the fundamental visual processes necessary for successful social interaction. It has therefore been assumed that face processing is largely universal among humans. However, recent studies have accumulated to challenge the idea of strictly universal facial processing. In this talk, I will present two on-going studies on real- and artificial-face processing from our laboratory. One study concerns eye movements during face observation in Japanese deaf people. We found differential fixation patterns between deaf and hearing people. The other study examines how people perceive and evaluate ambiguous faces of statues depicting Buddha (the Thousand Armed Kannon at
the Hall of the Lotus King, a.k.a. Sanjûsangendô, Kyoto, Japan). This study found several differences between Japanese and American observers in emotion and affective evaluations of the faces of Buddha statues. These results suggest that face processing and related mechanisms are not homogenous but can be influenced by experience.

BRIEF BIO: Katsumi Watanabe is Associate Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of Tokyo. He received his PhD in Computation and Neural Systems from California Institute of Technology, in 2001, for his work in cross-modal interaction in humans. He was a research fellow at the National Institute of Health (USA) and a researcher at the National Institute of Advanced Science and Technology (Japan). His research interests include: scientific investigations of explicit and implicit processes, interdisciplinary approaches to cognitive science, and real-life applications of cognitive science.

David Soto, Lecturer, Department of Medicine, Imperial College London
E-mail: D.Soto@imperial.ac.uk

Automatic guidance of attention from working memory

ABSTRACT: I will talk about recent research showing interactions between the process of keeping information 'online' in working memory, and the attention processes that select relevant information for action. I will show how human visual attention in health and disease can be strongly influenced by whether or not the stimuli in the scene match the current contents of working memory. Attentional guidance from the contents of working memory occurs automatically, even when it is detrimental to performance; new behavioral data suggest that working memory guidance can arise even when the working memory content is not consciously seen. I will also present data from ongoing functional brain imaging projects delineating the distinct neural mechanisms supporting guidance of attention from working memory and from implicit memory.

BRIEF BIO: Born in A Coruna (Spain), licenciado in Psychology, and PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Santiago de Compostela. He was a post-doctoral research fellow at the Behavioral Brain Sciences
Centre in Birmingham UK, visiting fellow at Harvard Medical School and then a research fellow of the British Academy at the Centre for Neuroscience at Imperial College London. Now he is a Lecturer at Imperial funded by a New Investigator Grant from the Medical Research Council. His main research interests revolve around the interplay between memory and attention in health and disease.

Inverse mapping the neuronal correlates of face categorizations - dynamically tracking the processing of local and global visual information in the brain.

ABSTRACT: One of the fundamental goals in cognitive neuroscience is to relate modulations in brain activity to perceptual and cognitive functions. Of critical importance is identifying the specific information being processed and how this information is distributed and transferred throughout the different brain regions involved. In this talk, I will present a reverse correlation methodology that makes it possible to directly study information processing in the brain, and report the application of these techniques to the study of face perception and the processing of local and global visual information in the brain.

BRIEF BIO: After a degree in Maths and Physics, I completed a PhD in physics at the University of Glasgow, Scotland in 2003 on the modeling of electromagnetic radiation emitted by living tissues (e.g. the brain). I then moved to a post-doctoral position with Professor Philippe Schyns in the department of Psychology, University of Glasgow looking at novel ways of interpreting brain-imaging data in terms of specific visual information processing content. From there I moved to a position at the MRC Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit in Cambridge where I continued exploring these topics, while also looking at the effects of sleep deprivation on recollection and familiarity in collaboration with Dr Richard Henson. In January 2010 I
joined the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck College as a lecturer.