International Graduate School of Neuroscience
Colloquium
May the faculty of language emerge from a glassy phase transition?
Monday, November 23, 2015, 12.30 p.m., Seminar Room FNO - 01 / 117
- Alessandro Treves
- SISSA - Cognitive Neuroscience, Trieste, Italy
In our group we have explored latching dynamics in simplified cortical networks as a model of spontaneous production, for example of sentences. Latching, or jumping from one attractor state to the next, emerges beyond a critical value of network connectivity, without any change or extra ingredient in organization, a clue to the possible evolutionary path of a cortex capable of sustaining language. In departing from the simplest model towards the complexity of real languages, however, we face the major effect of correlations and of the resulting disorder-dominated dynamics, which call for the refinement and application of statistical physics tools to linguistic data.
Host
- Sen Cheng
Mercator Research Group "Structure of Memory", Faculty of Psychology, Ruhr-University Bochum