ARI Guest Talk: 25 January 2024
Explaining how neuronal activity gives rise to cognition remains the most significant challenge in cognitive neuroscience. In the first part of this talk, I will introduce neuro-cognitive multilevel causal modeling (NC-MCM), a mathematical framework that bridges the explanatory gap between neuronal activity and cognition by construing cognitive states as causally consistent abstractions of neuronal states.
I will then show how the NC-MCM framework enables us to reason interchangeably about the dynamics and behavior of an organism on the neuronal and cognitive levels. In the second part of this talk, I will present an algorithm for learning NC-MCMs from neuronal activation patterns and demonstrate its ability to learn cognitive states of the nematode C. elegans from calcium imaging data.
Moritz Grosse-Wentrup is full professor and head of the Research Group Neuroinformatics at the University of Vienna. He develops machine learning algorithms that provide insights into how large-scale neural activity gives rise to (disorders of) cognition and applies these algorithms in the domain of cognitive neural engineering, e.g., to build brain-computer interfaces for communication with severely paralyzed patients, design closed-loop neural interfaces for stroke rehabilitation, and develop personalized brain stimulation paradigms.