PIRE Workshop/Summer School 2017

Event Details

PIRE Workshop/Summer School 2017

 June, 18-19 2017

 Hotel La Costa Golf & Resort in Pals, Girona

  

 The ability to map sensory inputs to meaningful semantic labels, i.e., to recognize objects, is foundational to cognition, and the human brain excels at object recognition tasks along ventral processing pathways and across sensory domains. Examples include perceiving spoken speech, reading written words, even recognizing tactile Braille patterns.  

 Multisensory integration also has to occur along the dorsal pathway for purposes of, e.g., heading and navigation, in which case visual and vestibular signals have to be integrated. 

 In each sensory modality, object recognition and spatial navigation appear to be realized by “simple-to-complex” multi-stage processing hierarchies in which tuning complexity grows gradually from simple features in primary sensory areas to complex representations in higher-level areas that ultimately interface with task-related circuits in prefrontal/premotor cortex. Crucially, real world stimuli usually do not have sensory signatures in just one modality but activate representations in different sensory domains, and successfully integrating these different hierarchical representations appears to be of key importance for cognition. 

 Prior theoretical work has mostly focused on tackling multisensory integration at isolated processing stages, and the computational functions and benefits of hierarchical multisensory interactions are still unclear. For instance, what characteristics of the input determine at which levels of two linked sensory processing hierarchies cross-sensory integration occurs? Can these connections form through unsupervised learning, just based on temporal coincidence? Which stages are connected: Is there selective audio-visual or visual-vestibular integration just at a low level of the hierarchy, e.g., to enable letter-by-letter reading, or even earlier levels at the level of primary sensory cortices, with multisensory selectivity in higher hierarchical levels then resulting from feedforward processing within each hierarchy, or are there selective connections at multiple hierarchical levels? What are the computational advantages of different cross-sensory connection schemes? What are roles for “top-down” vs. “lateral” inputs in learning cross-hierarchical connections? What are computationally efficient ways to leverage prior learning from one modality in learning hierarchical representations in a new modality?  

 Answering these questions will advance not just our understanding of how the brain links corresponding multisensory processing streams, but the results will also impact our understanding of how speech and language are processed, how the brain learns to navigate in space, and how corresponding disorders might arise from defects in multisensory integration in these systems. 

 The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers using experimental and theoretical approaches to tackle these questions.

  

 Organizers: Gustavo Deco (CBC), Josef Rauschecker (Georgetown Univ.), Maximilian Riesenhuber (Georgetown Univ.)

 Coordination: Klaus Wimmer (CBC), Katharina Glomb (CBC)

  

 Invited speakers

 Amir Amedi (Hebrew Univ.),  Dora Angelaki (Baylor), Michael Beauchamp (Baylor), Gustavo Deco (UPF Barcelona), Alex Martin (NIMH), Alex Meredith (VCU), Uta Noppeney (Univ. Birmingham), Josef Rauschecker (Georgetown Univ.), Maximilian Riesenhuber (Georgetown Univ.), Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells (Univ. Barcelona), Salvador Soto (UPF Barcelona), Josh Tenenbaum (MIT, tbc), Virginie van Wassenhove (INSERM), Ilker Yldirim (MIT)

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PIRE Workshop/Summer School 2017

Organized by CBC - Gustavo Deco, Maximilian Riesenhuber, Josef Rauschecker, Klaus Wimmer...