Talk within the colloquium Progress in Brain Language Research.

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Title: Towards a spatio-temporally resolved and algorithmically explicit account of cognition: vision and language

Presenter: Dr. Radoslaw Martin Cichy, Freie Universität Berlin

Abstract:  Understanding any cognitive function – such as vision or language - in the brain requires answering three questions: what is happening where and when in the human brain? In this talk I will present recent work that addresses these questions in an integrated analysis framework combining human magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and deep neural networks (DNNs). While I focus on vision, I claim all presented results can inform the study of language equally well. The talk has three parts. In the first part, I will show how fMRI and MEG can be combined using multivariate analysis techniques (classification plus representational similarity analysis) to yield a spatio-temporally integrated view of human brain activity during object vision.  In the second part I will show how DNNs can be used to understand the human visual system: they predict the spatial-temporal hierarchy of the human visual system, and representations of abstract visual properties, such as scene size, find an analogue in DNNs. In the third part I will highlight ongoing and future work. In particular, I will show how we see answers to following questions: how are sensory representations transformed into abstract representations, how do neural representations relate to behavior, how does visual cognition develop, how flexible is it?

Bio    

Radoslaw Martin Cichy is heading the Visual Cognition group at FU Berlin. His research focuses on mapping and understanding the neural dynamics of visual object recognition, using MEEG, fMRI, and deep neural networks. Before, RM Cichy worked at CSAIL, MIT. He holds a B.S. degree in Cognitive Science (University of Osnabrück) and a Ph.D. in psychology (Humboldt University, BCCN Berlin).

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