Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du Doctorat en informatique cognitive, en alliance avec le centre de recherche CRIA et l'ISC  

Paul CISEK

Jeudi le 30 mars 2023 à 10h30

PK-5115 (possible d'y assister à distance, pour ce faire, vous devez vous inscrire ici) 

Titre : Rethinking behavior in the light of evolution 

Résumé

In psychology and neuroscience, the brain is usually described as an information processing system that encodes and manipulates representations of knowledge to produce plans of action. This leads to a decomposition of brain functions into processes like object recognition, memory, decision-making, action planning, etc. However, neurophysiological data do not support many of these subdivisions. I will explore a different set of functional subdivisions, guided by data on the evolutionary process that produced the human brain. I will summarize a sequence of innovations that appeared in nervous systems from the earliest multicellular animals to humans. Along the way, functional subdivisions and elaborations will be introduced in parallel with the neural specializations that made them possible, gradually building up an alternative conceptual taxonomy of brain functions. These functions emphasize mechanisms for real-time interaction with the world, rather than for building explicit knowledge of the world, and the relevant representations emphasize pragmatic outcomes rather than decoding accuracy, mixing variables in the way seen in real neural data. This alternative taxonomy may better delineate the real functional pieces into which the human brain is organized, offering a more natural mapping between behavior and neural mechanisms.

 Biographie 

Paul CISEK is a professor in the Department of Neuroscience at the University of Montreal. He has a background in computer science, artificial intelligence, and neurophysiology. His work combines these in an interdisciplinary approach toward understanding how the brain controls our interactions with the world, suggesting that the brain is organized as a system of parallel sensorimotor streams that have been differentiated and elaborated over millions of years of evolution. His empirical work investigates the neural dynamics of how potential actions are specified and how they compete in cortical and subcortical circuits.

References  

Cisek, P. (2022) “Evolution of behavioural control from chordates to primates” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B. 377(1844): 20200522

Cisek, P. (2019) “Resynthesizing behavior through phylogenetic refinement” Attention, Perception, and Psychophysics. 81(7): 2265-2287 

Pezzulo, G. and Cisek, P. (2016) “Navigating the affordance landscape: Feedback control as a process model of behavior and cognition”. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. 20(6): 414-424.