September 2, 2008
University of Edinburgh
Satellite Symposium to First Meeting of Federation of the European Societies of Neuropsychology

NESTCOM Workshop on ESN

The workshop will be taking place in F21, Department of Psychology, University of Edinburgh, 7 George Square between 2-6pm.

Message from ESN to Conference Delegates: Attendance at this workshop is already included in your conference program. However, due to limited venue capacity, we need to know in advance how many people wish to attend. If you do wish to attend this event and HAVE NOT already registered for it via the Ncore website, please email sarah.macpherson@ed.ac.uk as soon as possible.

Contact: Dr Mike Knowles (Michael.Knowles at Sunderland.ac.uk)

A recent and fruitful enterprise in neuroinformatics and robotics is to build computer models of cognition that exploit neuroimaging and neurophysiological data, including evidence from monkeys. New explanatory models of neuronal function use principles from neuroscience and brain-inspired architectures to provide a mechanistic basis for human language, action and perception systems, including their activation dynamics in brain space and real time. Such models of human and animal cognition can be implemented in robots, allowing them to employ neuroscientifically grounded perception action networks in the generation of language and "thought". The more realistic models of cognition may eventually lead to a better understanding of the cognitive processes and their underlying neurophysiological patterns.

This will be the second workshop organized by the Nestcom project to highlight “What it means to communicate” – in terms of brain mechanisms, physiological activations, cognitive processes and sub-processes, AI software, neural network features and architectures, and robotics. The first International workshop held at ICANN’07, centred on the neural, computational and cognitive principles of communication. The Edinburgh workshop will focus on embodied communication, symbols and meaning in humans, animals and robots. Speakers will address specific questions in the science of language and communication integrating across research disciplines. Demonstrating for example, how neuroscience can improve robots, how models of neuroinformatics can inspire neuroimaging studies of cognition, how cognitive science can widen the scope of both experiments in neuroscience and network models. The overarching aim of the workshop is to increase the general awareness of cross-disciplinary work on neuroscience, robotics, language and communication.

Time

Speaker

Title

2.00pm

Giovanni Buccino

Nouns and verbs in action

2.30pm

Juan Carlos Gómez

Embodying meaning and intentionality: insights from primates, autism, and Brentano

3.00pm

Gert Westermann

Developing speech sounds through linking perception and production

3.30pm

Break

4.00pm

Stefan Wermter

Nestcom: What it means to communicate

4.30pm

Martin Pickering

Integrating language production and comprehension in the study of communication

5.00pm

Friedemann Pulvermüller and Max Garagnani

Action-perception networks are discrete: Evidence from neuronal network simulations and magnetoencephalography

5.30pm

Discussion and Closing Remarks