2012 Walker L. Cisler Lecture

How Does the Brain Make the Mind?  
Presented by Garrison W. Cottrell  

Tuesday, March 27, 2012
7:30 p.m.
University Technology Learning Center 
Lear Auditorium (T429) 
Dessert reception follows 

Garrison W. Cottrell 
Professor, Computer Science and Engineering 
Director, Temporal Dynamics of Learning Center
University of California, San Diego 

How does the activity in our brain create the mind? One way to understand the mind is to build computer models that “do the same things people do.” Garrison W. Cottrell investigates this question in the context of how we see: how do we recognize faces, facial expressions, and objects? This seems so simple – we look, we see! But it isn’t that simple, something you discover if you try to write a computer program that can automatically label faces and objects with their names. Prof. Cottrell will describe his computer models of how we see, and how our brains can often fool us about what we see.

Cottrell, who has been working on neural network models of mental processes for over 30 years, describes the field of cognitive science and how building working models of mental processes can provide insights into how the mind works.

An internationally known researcher in computational cognitive neuroscience, Cottrell earned a PhD in computer science from the University of Rochester and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with neural network pioneer David Rumelhart. His research group, Gary’s Unbelievable Research Unit (GURU), which has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, focuses on how the visual system might learn representations of the world, how our attention is drawn to different objects in our visual field, and how we use these processes to recognize objects.

The annual Walker L. Cisler Lecture is dedicated to the improvement of science education.