12/02/2001

HELSINKI SUMMER SCHOOL IN COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE

Dear Colleagues,

The Helsinki Summer School in Cognitive Neuroscience will be organized for the second time from the 2nd to 7th of September 2001, in Lammi (ca. 120 km north of Helsinki). Topics will include auditory attention and memory, brain plasticity and learning, neurocognitive rehabilitation, multimodal brain imaging (EEG, MEG, fMRI, PET), and mismatch negativity (MMN) in basic and clinical research. Applicants are graduate students and post doc fellows with a major in psychology, medicine, medical engineering, cognitive
science, cognitive neuroscience, or related disciplines such as phonetics, linguistics, or cognitive musicology. The Summer School program will consist of lectures, discussions, teamwork,and poster sessions. The registration fee of 1600 FIM (269 Euro) includes the Summer School educational and social program, full board, accommodation in a student dormitory and transportation from and to Helsinki downtown.
Applicants should e-mail their CV (with a list of publications), a description of their research work and scientific interests (max. 800 words) and their full contact information to the organizing committee (HSCN2001@psych.helsinki.fi) by April 15, 2001.
Further information, including a list of the lecturers, is provided at our
WebPages, http://www.cbru.helsinki.fi/hscn2001/info

On behalf of the organizing committee,
Titia van Zuijen
 

27/11/2000

OXFORD SUMMER SCHOOL ON CONNECTIONIST MODELLING
Department of Experimental Psychology
University of Oxford

Sunday July 15th to Friday July 27th, 2001

Applications are invited for participation in a 2-week residential
Summer School on techniques in connectionist modelling.  The course is aimed primarily at researchers who wish to exploit neural network models in their teaching and/or research and it will provide a general introduction to connectionist modelling, biologically plausible neural networks and brain function through lectures and exercises on Macintosh's and PC's.  The course  is interdisciplinary in content though many of the illustrative examples are taken from cognitive and developmental psychology, and cognitive neuroscience.  The instructors with primary responsibility for teaching the course are Kim Plunkett and Edmund Rolls.
Further information:
http://www-cogsci.psych.ox.ac.uk/summer-school/
 

15/11/2000

CONFERENCE
The XIIth Conference of the European Society for Cognitive Psychology and the XVIII Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society Cognitive Psychology Section to be held in Edinburgh, Scotland, 5 - 8 September, 2001
http://www.psyc.abdn.ac.uk/escop2001/index.htm

Summer-
School Report

ESCOP Summer School on Learning in Wuerzburg, Germany

The acquisition of behavioral competence was the topic of a summer school on Learning held in Wuerzburg on September 22nd to 27th, under the auspices of ESCOP and generously sponsored by the Volkswagen Foundation. 42 scholars of Psychology from, literally, all over the world, took part in the event to discuss the most recent developments in various areas of learning research. Most participants came from countries within central Europe, but there were also participants from the United States and even a graduate student from Australia.

Eight invited lecturers had four hours each to bring students up to scratch in their respective area of expertise. A first emphasis of the scientific program dealt with elementary associative learning processes. John Pearce of Cardiff University gave a lecture on associative learning in animals, with special consideration of discrimination learning. Mark Gluck from Rutgers University, New Jersey presented an overview of current data and models regarding the function of the hippocampus in associative learning. Finally, David Shanks from University College, London talked about associative learning in humans, comparing various theoretical approaches in the light of the available data and making special reference to the implicit/explicit debate.

The modeling of learning in animats was the topic of the lecture by Jean-Arcady Meyer from the University of Paris 6. He gave an overview of different approaches to autonomous learning mechanisms in artificial intelligence, including classifier systems and genetic algorithms. Axel Cleeremans from the Free University of Brussels focussed on discussing the function of consciousness in human learning with special reference to a comparison of human data with network simulations of various sequence learning tasks.

The ontogenetic development of behavioral competence was the central topic of Claes van Hofsten’s (Uppsala University) lecture. He discussed, amongst other topics, the theoretical significance of experimental data and demonstrations regarding the control of eye movements and grasping in infants. Joachim Hoffmann and his colleagues from the University of Wuerzburg reported about current research on the control of voluntary behavior. Special attention was given to the ideo-motor hypothesis and the role of action-outcomes in behavioral control. Finally, Philippe Schyns from the University of Glasgow talked about perceptual learning and the role of subjects’ preconceptions in discrimination tasks. He presented new methods and data that shed light on the flexibility with which the human visual system adapts to currently required discriminations.

In addition to the invited lectures, each participant of the summer school presented some of her/his current work on a poster in one of three poster sessions. Thus, lecturers as well as participants likewise contributed through presentations of their research to very lively and inspiring discussions of current issues in learning research for the whole duration of the summer school. We all agreed in a final discussion session that was organized by some of the participants that there is still a lot of food for future research and that it is worth to deepen the exchange and the cooperation among the groups in Europe dealing with learning in psychology, neuropsychology and artificial intelligence. As a first step in this enterprise we have now established the European Network of Cognitive Learning Research (ENCOL).

Joachim Hoffmann
on behalf of the organizers

Last updated 12 February 2001 by Armin Stock