Please join us on Monday for a Cognitive Science Colloquium by Michael Spivey (UC Merced; formally Cornell). Dr. Spivey will be talking about research leading to his new book "The Continuity of Mind" (2007). Hope to see you all there.
April 6, 2009
4:00-5:30 p.m.
PY 101
Michael Spivey, Department of Cognitive Science, University of California, Merced, will present, "On the Continuity of Mind."
Abstract:
Rather than a sequence of logical operations performed on discrete symbols, real-time cognition is better described as continuously changing patterns of neuronal activity. The continuity in these dynamics indicates that, in between describable states of mind, much of our mental activity does not lend itself to the linguistic labels relied on by much of psychology. I will discuss eye-tracking and computer-mouse-tracking evidence for this temporal continuity in spoken word recognition, sentence comprehension, categorization, and even decision-making. I will also provide simulations and geometric visualizations of mental activity depicted as a continuous trajectory through a neuronal state space. In this theoretical framework, close visitations of labeled attractors may constitute word recognition events and object recognition events, but the majority of the mental trajectory traverses unlabeled regions of state space, resulting in multifarious mixtures of mental states.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment