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Cognitive Neuroscience of Visual Knowledge: Where Vision Meets Memory
2008 Second Annual Tufts University Conference on Emerging Trends
in Behavioral, Affective, Social, and Cognitive (BASC) Neurosciences
May 29 - May 31, 2008
Tufts University, Medford, MA
Key Organizer: Haline Schendan, Department of Psychology, Tufts University
Sponsored by American Psychological Association, Tufts University, and Charles River Association for Memory
ABSTRACT SUBMISSION IS NOW CLOSED.
Introduction
How can people interact appropriately with and understand the world they see
around them? To do so, people must accurately perceive and conceptualize about
the world, an ability that depends inherently upon their prior experience with
the environment and their ability to consciously or nonconsciously reactivate
this knowledge. This conference will bring together researchers in vision and
memory, two important fields of Psychology that have proceeded largely in
parallel. The National Institute of Health has recognized that advances in the
field of learning and memory are among the greatest successes that science has
made toward the goal of understanding the human mind. Moreover, the field of
learning and memory has one of the longest and most fruitful histories of
investigating conscious versus nonconscious processes, with key discoveries
coming from studies of patients with amnesia. A deeper understanding of the
latest discoveries in learning and memory is thus certain to inspire comparable
advances among vision scientists. In turn, vision is the dominant sensory
modality in humans, and so a deeper understanding of the neural basis of vision
is sure to provide important information for developing comprehensive theories
of visual learning and memory. Emerging research on the neural basis of visual
knowledge has begun to achieve this desirable synthesis of vision and learning
and memory fields. This conference will serve to facilitate not only the
cross-pollination of ideas among scientists in each field but also to promote
the continued emergence of a new field of visual knowledge that incorporates,
with equal emphasis, the key ideas from both of these established research
domains. Moreover, the conference will enable interactions not only among
cognitive psychologists and cognitive neuroscientists in vision or memory fields
who test human participants but also neurobiologists who study the neural basis
of vision and memory in animals and scientists using computational modeling to
develop theories of visual knowledge. These scientists rarely come together to
exchange perspectives but instead attend separate meetings and yet their
interactions are crucial to rapid advances in each field and the continued
emergence of a field of visual knowledge.
To achieve these conference goals, speakers have been carefully
selected from the fields of Cognitive Neuroscience, Cognitive
Psychology, Neurobiology, and Computational Modeling. Learn more
about the speakers
at this conference.
We'd like to give special thanks to our sponsors:
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