Distinguished Speaker Series

Curiosity and information demand: how we can study them and why we should care A rapidly growing literature has recently emphasized the importance of our sense-making instincts, including complex investigative behaviors such as curiosity, for behavior and brain function. While much of this literature has focused on simple forms of decision making, we explored its

Abstract: Swarms of insects, schools of fish and flocks of birds display an impressive variety of collective movement patterns that emerge from interactions among group members. These puzzling phenomena raise a variety of questions about the interaction rules that govern the coordination of individuals’ motion and the emergence of large-scale patterns. While numerous models have

Giovanni Pezzulo is a researcher at the Institute of Cognitive Sciences and Technologies, National Research Council in Rome, Italy. His research centers on the neuronal and computational mechanisms of predictive processing, goal-directed behaviour, and the sensorimotor foundations of higher cognition. Human sensorimotor communication during human joint action: experimental and computational perspectives During online social interactions,

Seeing by moving: the indissoluble bond between perception and action Establishing a representation of space is a major goal of sensory systems.  Spatial information, however, is not always explicit in the incoming sensory signals. In most modalities it needs to be actively extracted from cues embedded in the temporal flow of receptor activation. Vision, on

I will present a model of continuous-time opinion dynamics for an arbitrary number of agents that communicate over a network and form real-valued opinions about an arbitrary number of options.  The model generalizes linear and nonlinear models in the literature. Drawing from biology, physics, and social psychology, we introduce an attention parameter to modulate social

ABSTRACT: Self-preservation is embodied in our brain’s circuitry: we seek food when hungry, warmth when cold, and mates when lusty. In the evolution of the mammalian brain, circuitry for regulating one’s own survival and well-being was modified. For sociality, the important result was that the ambit of me extends to include others -- me-and-mine. Offspring, mates, and kin came

Speaker: Peter Dayan, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, https://www.mpg.de/12309357/biologische-kybernetik-dayan Hosted by Henning Sprekeler; moderated by Robert Tjarko Lange Peril, Prudence and Planning as Risk, Avoidance and Worry Risk occupies a central role in both the theory and practice of decision-making. Although it is deeply implicated in many conditions involving dysfunctional behavior and thought, modern

It is a commonly held assumption that the fovea is where the interesting action occurs. To scrutinize this assumption, we conducted a series of experiments that addressed the following question: How important are the different regions of the visual field for gaze guidance in everyday visual-cognitive tasks? Following on from classic findings for sentence reading, I will present key results from various

Recent years have seen a considerable surge of research on interest-based engagement, examining how and why people are engaged in activities without relying on extrinsic rewards. However, the field of inquiry has been somewhat segregated into three different research traditions which have been developed relatively independently --- research on curiosity, interest, and trait curiosity/interest. The

Abstract: In current debates over deep-neural-network-based AI, deep learning researchers have adopted the mantle of philosophical empiricism and associationism, and its critics have taken up the side of philosophical rationalism and nativism.  These rationalist critics, however, often interpret associationism and empiricism in a way which is too caricatured to fit the views of any significant