Embodied and Embedded Brains

Continental breakfast will begin at 9:30 am, and doors will open at 9:45 am.

Kia Nobre, WTI Associate Director and Director of the Center for Neurocognition and Behavior, will welcome attendees and open the conference.

Humans and marmoset monkeys are the rare vocal learners among primates. They are a biological puzzle. Focusing on marmosets, we will first show that vocal learning emerges in a landscape of anatomical changes, not just neural changes. By comparing the two species, we will then consider the possibility that their potential for vocal learning is the product of evolutionary changes to their developmental timing and social structure.

11:00 am | “The continuously adapting brain: How body states regulate brain blood flow and neuronal signaling” by Doug Rothman
This talk proposes an alternative, non-brain-centric view of the regulation of neurovascular coupling, neuroenergetics, and neuronal signaling, in which all three continuously adapt to the state of the body (e.g., physical activity, posture, respiration, blood chemistry).

11:20 am | “Agent-based modeling for Motor Control and Social Behavior” by Shreya Saxena
When do we need embodied agents?

11:40 am | “Building connections and ideas in the trainee community” by Ashlea Segal and Evyn Dickinson
To build connections across our diverse research community, this talk will highlight trainees’ shared burning questions, big ideas, and out-of-the-box thoughts that drive our collective curiosity about cognition and the mind.

Lunch will be available in the lounge.

Over the last decades, the interdisciplinary field of the affective sciences has seen proliferation rather than integration of theoretical perspectives. This is due to differences in metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions about human affective phenomena (what they are and how they work) which, shaped by academic motivations and values, have determined the affective constructs and operationalizations. An assumption on the purpose of affective phenomena in humans can be used as a teleological principle to guide the construction of a common set of metaphysical and mechanistic assumptions—a framework for human affective research.

1:30 pm | “Emotion inference outside of the lab” by Maria Gendron
The talk will highlight how findings from fieldwork challenge simplistic assumptions about the nature of emotion inference and suggest future avenues for bridging lab and world.

1:50 pm | “Socially assistive robotics” by Brian Scasselatti
From children with autism to adults living with dementia, robots are becoming a reasonable way to provide on-demand social and cognitive support.

2:10 pm | Wu Tsai Postdoctoral Fellows, Weikang Shi and Josue Ortega Caro

"Neural dynamics of social evidence accumulation in cooperative interactions of freely moving marmosets” by Weikang Shi
Freely moving marmosets use social gaze to accumulate social evidence before cooperative actions, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex encodes this process through both single-neuron ramping and population-level trajectory dynamics.

“Modeling of spatiotemporal dynamics through large scale deep learning models” by Josue Ortega Caro
This talk will focus on the development of computational methods to understand how brain wide neural dynamics change during learning and in the context of different mental disorders.

Refreshments will be available in the lounge area.

New technologies and information enable novel insights into the behavioral and ecological mechanisms that drive the fate of species in a changing world.

In conversation with Susan Fitzpatrick, Kia Nobre and Wendy Berry Mendes will discuss how to promote collaboration to investigate cognition in an integrative and ecological way.

Attendees will discuss ideas presented from the day’s sessions.

Refreshments will be available in the lounge area.