Action-perception circuits: Towards a unifying neurocomputational account of the emergence of language and cognition - Max Garagnani (University of London)

Abstract: Embodied semantic theories posit that word meaning and concepts are grounded in the perception and action systems of the brain. Such theories are supported by a growing body of experimental results, but do not always provide a satisfactory, cortical-level explanation of how conceptual grounding in the sensory and motor systems occurs, exactly. 
I briefly present a neurocomputational architecture of the left-hemispheric fronto-temporal cortical areas that we used to simulate and explain neural processes underlying word learning and semantic grounding in action and perception. The model’s main distinguishing features are that: (i) it replicates connectivity and anatomical structure of the relevant cortical areas, and (ii) it implements only well-documented neurophysiological principles known to be pervasive in the mammalian cortex. In addition to integrating seemingly incongruent sets of data from the language domain, I show that the same computational architecture also explains a range of experimental results from other domains, making a number of novel testable predictions. I conclude by offering a unifying computational account for the emergence of language and cognitive function based on the spontaneous formation and dynamics of cortically distributed action-perception circuits in the brain.

Bio: Max Garagnani is a Senior Lecturer in Computer Science and leader of the Goldsmiths Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Postgraduate Programme at the University of London, as well as a visiting researcher at the Brain Language Laboratory at the Free University of Berlin.
 He is primarily known for his work on bio-realistic neural network models that closely mimic the structure, connectivity, and physiology of the human cortex.
He sits on the editorial boards of the journals of Frontiers in Computational Neuroscience and Frontiers in Psychology - Cognition, is Associate Editor of IET Cognitive Computation and Systems, and holds a position on the Board of Directors of the Organization for Computational Neuroscience.