Lundi 2 Décembre, Maison Internationale de la Recherche, Institut d’Études Avancés de l’Université de Cergy-Pontoise.
Le séminaire débutera à 12h30 par déjeuner auquel les participants sont conviés (enregistrement gratuit mais obligatoire sur le lien https://form.jotformeu.com/93132756002348 ), et il s’adresse à un large public interdisciplinaire de chercheurs et étudiants avancés. A cette occasion nous recevrons deux orateurs, qui abordent à deux échelles très différents la problématique de la cognition (individuelle et sociale):
1. Vittorio Loreto , SONY Computer Science Laboratories, Paris, France; Sapienza University of Rome, Physics Dept., Rome, Italy; Complexity Science Hub Vienna, Vienna, Austria
Title: Exploring the adjacent possible: play, anticipation, surprise Novelties frequently occur in our individual daily lives. We meet new people, learn and use new words, listen to new songs, watch a new movie, adopt new technology.Such unique experiences sometimes happen by chance. Often they are triggered by earlier new experiences, thus providing a compelling correlation between their appearances.
Historically the notion of the « new » has always offered challenges to humankind. What is new often defies the natural tendency of humans to predict and control future events. Still, we base most of our decisions on our expectations about the future. From this perspective, a deep understanding of the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge and humans anticipate their occurrence is key to progress in all sectors of human activities. The common intuition that one new thing often leads to another is captured, mathematically, by the notion of « adjacent possible ».The adjacent possible is the set of all those things (ideas, linguistic structures, concepts, molecules, genomes, technological artifacts, etc.) that are one step away from what exists, and hence can arise from incremental modifications and recombination of existing material.
In this talk, I’ll present a mathematical framework describing the expansion of the adjacent possible, whose predictions are borne out in several data sets drawn from social and technological systems.
2. Boris Gutkin , Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives et computationnelles, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, France.
Title: Modelling the Role of Neural Oscillatory Activity in Working Memory.
Cognitive effort such as remembering information in the short-term that is used to perform tasks (working memory) leads to a seeming cacophony of brain oscillations. During experimental tasks engaging working memory (WM), data show that specific oscillatory frequency bands of brain activity modulate in space and time.Despite ample data correlating such modulation to task performance, a mechanistic explanation remains elusive. To start deciphering this connection we built and analysed a reduced model of the sustained neural activity that implements WM. Based on our model we propose that flexible control of neural oscillations provides a unified mechanism for the rapid and controlled transitions between the computational operations required by WM. The various frequency bands determine the dynamic gating regimes enabling the necessary operations for WM, whose succession explains the need for the complex oscillatory brain dynamics during effortful cognition.