Alumni Talk Series: Myriam Sander (Berlin) and Radoslaw M. Cichy (Berlin)
Myriam Sander was a member of doctoral cohort 2007–2010. She is now a Minerva group leader at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. Myriam will speak about “Episodic memory decline in aging”. Abstract: Episodic memory, the ability to remember past episodes with their contextual details, declines as we age. This decline in memory performance is related to senescent changes in the underlying neural networks, particularly in hippocampal and prefrontal regions. These regions play a major role for the representation of information as well as the control of memory content. I will present a series of studies that shed light on the importance of the quality of representations and control mechanisms for memory performance in younger and older adults. Radoslaw M. Cichy was a member of doctoral cohort 2007–2010. He is now an Emmy Noether group leader of the Neural Dynamics of Visual Cognition project at Freie Universität Berlin. Radek will speak about “A spatio-temporally resolved and algorithmically explicit account of human vision”. Abstract: Understanding visual cognition in the brain requires answering three questions: what is happening where and when in the human brain when we see? In this talk I will present recent work that addresses these questions in an integrated analysis framework combining human magnetoencephalography (MEG), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and deep neural networks (DNNs). The talk has three parts. In the first part, I will show how fMRI and MEG can be combined using multivariate analysis techniques (classification plus representational similarity analysis) to yield a spatio-temporally integrated view of human brain activity during object vision (Cichy et al., 2014 NatNeuro). In the second part I will show how DNNs can be used to understand visual representations. In the third, shorter part I will describe ongoing work and future directions (e.g. how do abstract representations emerge, how flexible and plastic is visual cognition?).
