[lingtalks] Michael Spivey Talk, Wed. Dec. 3 at 4:30pm

[Steven Ford]

The UCSD Department of Cognitive Science is pleased to announce a talk in 
their Distinguished Speaker Series

Dr. Michael Spivey
UC Merced, Cognitive Science Program

Wednesday, December 3, 2008 at 4:30pm
Cognitive Science Building, room 003


"On the Continuity of Mind"

Abstract:
Rather than a sequence of logical operations performed on discrete symbols, 
real-time cognition is better described as continuously changing patterns 
of neuronal activity. The continuity in these dynamics indicates that, in 
between describable states of mind, much of our mental activity does not 
lend itself to the linguistic labels relied on by much of classical 
cognitive science. I will discuss eye-tracking and reach-tracking evidence 
for this temporal continuity in speech perception, spoken word recognition, 
categorization, and even decision-making. I will also provide geometric 
visualizations of mental activity depicted as a continuous trajectory 
through a neuronal state space. In this theoretical framework, close 
visitations of labeled attractors may constitute word recognition events 
and object recognition events, but the majority of the mental trajectory 
traverses unlabeled regions of state space, resulting in multifarious 
mixtures of mental states.
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