Stanislas Dehaene, guest at the PNC Distinguished Lectures

29.04.2024

As part of the seminars organized by the “Padua Neuroscience Center – PNC”, Stanislas Dehaene, Director of INSERM Unit 562, “Cognitive Neuroimaging” and Professor at the Collège de France, will give a talk entitled Understanding the neural code for symbols and languages: A challenge for human cognitive neuroscience on May 2, 2024, at the Sala Seminari of the Fondazione Ricerca Biomedica Avanzata VIMM (via Orus 2 - Padua), at 3:00 pm.

Cognition is distinctly different in humans compared to other animals. A unique feature of our species is natural language, but in this talk, it will be argued that a competence for symbols and languages drives many other cognitive domains, such as our unique abilities for geometry, mathematics, or music. Even the mere perception of a square or a zig-zag is driven by minimal description length (MDL) and thus involves a search for the shortest “mental program” that captures the observed data in an internal “language of geometry”. Behavioral and brain imaging experiments indicate that the perception of geometric shapes is poorly captured by current convolutional neural network models of the ventral visual pathway, but involves a symbolic geometrical description within the dorsal parieto-prefrontal network. It will be argued that existing connectionist models do not suffice to account for even elementary human perceptual data, and that neural codes for symbols and syntax remain to be discovered.

The seminar is held in English, and it is open to professors, researchers, lecturers, Ph.D. students, postdoctoral fellows and grant holders.

Attendance is free as long as seats are available.

Further information: administration.pnc@unipd.it