14 SEP 2022
18:00 - 19:30

Abstract :

Panpsychism was proposed as an alternative to emergentism in order to consider consciousness not as a result of the complexity of lower levels, but as a fundamental truth in the world, and in this way, to overcome the challenges faced by emergentism. In this lecture, while illustrating emergentism framework and its two weak and strong versions, I will explain its main problem and ambiguity from the perspective of physicalism. Then, by explaining Panpsychism approach and the evolution of its versions during recent decades, aim to show that more reasonable versions of Panpsychism - which do not suffer from the "problem of composition" - face the main challenge of emergentism, and ultimately fall under the same framework. Also, while referring to Mulla Sadra's view of physical occurrence, I will explain its basic similarity with strong emergentism and its common challenge with the above two ideas.

More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp

7 SEP 2022
19:00 - 20:30

Abstract :

This talk will argue that the reason that perception is fundamentally different from cognition is that perception is non-conceptual whereas cognition is conceptual. I will review evidence that infants between the ages of 6 and 11 months can see colors but cannot accomplish even the simplest kinds of cognition involving colors. Children of the same ages can see shapes and also exhibit cognition with shape concepts. I will argue that the upshot is that color perception of these infants is non-conceptual and that one can extrapolate from this finding to all of perception.

More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp

27 JUL 2022
18:30 - 20:00

Abstract:

Visual attention is an integral part of our daily life. A network of cortical and subcortical structures are involved in control of visual attention. To date, how these areas interact with each other and the chain of events giving rise to visual attention are still unclear. I will present our findings regarding the neurons and neuromodulators involved in control of visual cortical signals and discuss how these findings help us untangle the neural circuitry of attention.

More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp

20 JUL 2022
18:30 - 20:00

Abstract:

چکیده:

Brain function depends on neural communication, but the mechanisms of this communication are not well understood. Recent studies suggest that one form of neural communication is through traveling waves (TWs)—patterns of neural oscillations that propagate within and between areas. In this talk, I'll review potential mechanisms generating these propagating oscillations, and then I'll cover an experimental design investigating the behavioral relevance of TWs. In this study, we show TWs appear robustly in microarray recordings in monkey frontal and parietal cortex and encode memory for recent rewards. While making saccades to obtain probabilistic rewards, monkeys were sensitive to the (statistically irrelevant) prior reward, which is consistent with behavioral biases produced by reward history. TWs in frontal and parietal areas were stronger in trials following a prior reward versus a lack of reward and, in the frontal lobe, correlated with the monkeys’ sensitivity to the prior reward. The findings suggest that neural communication across fronto-parietal areas, reflected by TWs, maintains default reward memories, while communication within the frontal lobe mediates the read out of the memories for prospective expectations.



More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp

22 JUN 2022
15:30 - 17:00


Abstract:
It is widely believed that consciousness presents a “hard problem”, different in kind from those posed by other aspects of the mind, such as memory or attention. A huge amount of philosophical work has been devoted to this problem. But does consciousness really present such an intractable problem? Or is the problem an imaginary one, created by the way philosophers think about consciousness? What exactly is it that we are trying to explain with a theory of consciousness? This webinar will introduce these issues and suggest that, although consciousness certainly presents many explanatory problems, it doesn’t pose the single, hyper-difficult problem that many philosophers think it does.

More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp

7 JUN 2022
10:00 - 11:30

Abstract:

The hippocampus plays a critical role in spatial learning and memory. Neurons in hippocampal output area CA1 are thought to exhibit redundancy across cortical and hippocampal inputs. In this talk, I show instead that acute silencing of CA3 axon terminals drastically reduces place field responses for many CA1 neurons and disrupts the content of sharp-wave ripple-based CA1 ensemble activity. These results imply that CA3 is the predominant driver of CA1 place cells under normal conditions.

Venue:
School of Cognitive Sciences, Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM),
Opposite the ARAJ, Artesh Highway, Tehran, Iran


More Info:

17 MAY 2022
11:30 - 13:00

Event Link :
https://join.skype.com/Neq7oL9ixMQy


More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/new/docs/ashmore.jpeg

6 MAR 2022
16:00 - 18:00

IPM SCS Webinar

Abstract:


A powerful simulator highly decreases the need for real-world tests when training and evaluating autonomous vehicles. Data-driven simulators flourished with the recent advancement of conditional Generative Adversarial Networks (cGANs), providing high-fidelity images. The main challenge is synthesizing photorealistic images while following given constraints. In this work, we propose to improve the quality of generated images by rethinking the discriminator architecture. The focus is on the class of problems where images are generated given semantic inputs, such as scene segmentation maps or human body poses. We build on successful cGAN models to propose a new semantically-aware discriminator that better guides the generator. We aim to learn a shared latent representation that encodes enough information to jointly do semantic segmentation, content reconstruction, along with a coarse-to-fine grained adversarial reasoning. The achieved improvements are generic and simple enough to be applied to any architecture of conditional image synthesis. We demonstrate the strength of our method on the scene, building, and human synthesis tasks across three different datasets. The code is available https://github.com/vita-epfl/SemDisc

More Info: http://scs.ipm.ac.ir/talk.jsp