Why do neurons in cortex respond so selectively to words, objects and faces? Seminar
- Time:
- 16:00 - 18:00
- Date:
- 13 November 2014
- Venue:
- University of Southampton Highfield Campus Shackleton Building (Building 44) Level 1, Room 1087
For more information regarding this seminar, please email Coral Abraham or Allyson Marchi at Coral.Abraham@soton.ac.uk; A.Marchi@soton.ac.uk .
Event details
Visiting Speaker - Autumn Psychology Seminar Series
A classic finding in neuroscience is that single neurons in cortex often respond to information (e.g., an image of a face) in a highly selective manner. An obvious question is why do neurons respond in this way? I'll describe a series of neural network simulations that show that models learn to code information in a selective manner when they are trained to store many things at the same time in short-term memory.
Speaker information
Professor Jeffrey Bowers, University of Bristol. I received my degree in psychology (BSc) at the University of Toronto (1987), and completed a Ph.D. with Daniel Schacter and Kenneth Forster at the University of Arizona (1993) on the topic of long-term priming. I then moved to Montreal for a post-doctoral position at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Centre Hospitalier Cote-Des-Neiges, working with Daniel Bub on letter-by-letter reading (1993-1994). Following this I moved to Rice University as an assistant professor (1994-1998), and then took a position of a lecturer at the University of Bristol, where I am now a professor.