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COGNITION & LANGUAGE
How the brain makes meaning: explorations in the cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience of semantic cognition
Friday May 04, 2012 | 01:30 -05:15 PM | TBA

How do we go beyond the information given to attribute unseen properties to things? For example, when you see a bird on a branch, how do you know that it might fly away? The speakers in this symposium will approach these and related questions using a combination of computational models, data from experimental studies of children's and adult's semantic cognition, and studies of the neural basis of semantic processing, including effects of brain damage and functional brain imaging studies. The work grows out of the Parallel Distributed Processing (PDP) framework for modeling cognitive processes, which will be introduced, along with a model of semantic cognition, in the first talk. In this approach, cognitive processes are seen as emergent consequences of interactive processing distributed over ensembles of mutually interconnected neurons that employ learned distributed representations to represent semantic content. As the symposium will make clear, this framework is useful in accounting for findings from cognitive neuroscience, and makes contact with central issues in representation, processing and learning within cognitive science as well.