Séminaire ayant lieu dans le cadre du doctorat en informatique cognitive, en collaboration avec le centre de recherche CRIA et l'ISC    

Michael ARBIB

Jeudi le 6 février 2025 à 10h30

Local: PK-5115   (Il est possible d'y assister en virtuel en vous inscrivant ici)   

TITRE :   The Evolution of the Construction-Ready Brain

RÉSUMÉ

Humans, like animals, have perceptions, actions, and thoughts that they cannot put into words. The challenge is to understand how humans gained the ability to put so much into words, describing not only what is but also what is not and what could possibly be, and in this way came to construct a diversity of physical and symbolic worlds (Arbib et al., 2023, 2024). Building on modeling brain mechanisms for sensorimotor interaction with the world, we have explored both “how the brain got language” (Arbib, 2012) and what happens “when brains meet buildings” (Arbib, 2021). The little explored relation between these two studies is rooted in the notion of “construction” as used in a physical sense in architecture and in a symbolic sense as the tool for assembling utterances hierarchically. This talk offers hypotheses that address the question of how biological evolution yielded humans with the “construction-ready brains” and bodies that made us capable of the cultural evolution that created the diversity of our mental and physical constructs that we know today. The framework for all this is EvoDevoSocio – the idea that biological evolution yields biological mechanisms for both development and adult function of members of a species, but that social interaction is an important part of that environment, and that in humans cultural evolution has played the crucial role in changing the social, physical and increasingly symbolic and technological environments in which most humans now develop. The bridge between the two forms of construction is provided by the rooting of pantomime in manual action.

BIOGRAPHIE

Michael A. Arbib, University Professor Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Computer Science, Biomedical Engineering, Biological Sciences, and Psychology at the University of Southern California (USC). He is currently also an Adjunct Professor of Psychology at UCSD. Arbib’s research bridges neuroscience, computer science, and cognitive science, with a focus on the coordination of perception and action in frogs, rats, monkeys and humans. He applies schema theory and neural network analysis to study brain function, robotics, and machine vision. Known for the Mirror System Hypothesis, he explores language evolution through neural mechanisms for action understanding. More recently, he has explored the neuroscience of the experience of buildings, the design of buildings, and what it might mean for buildings to have “brains.

RÉFÉRENCES

Arbib, M. A. (1964). Brains, machines, and mathematics. McGraw-Hill.

Arbib, M. A., & Caplan, D. (1979). Neurolinguistics must be Computational. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 2, 449-483. [My thanks to Stevan Harnad for founding this important journal.]

Arbib, M. A. (Ed.). (2003). The handbook of brain theory and neural networks, Second Edition. MIT press.

Arbib, M. A. (2005). From monkey-like action recognition to human language: An evolutionary framework for neurolinguistics. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 28(2), 105-124.

Arbib, M. A. (2012). How the brain got language: The mirror system hypothesis. Oxford University Press

Arbib, M.A. (2021). When Brains Meet Buildings: A Conversation Between Neuroscience and Architecture, Oxford University Press.

Arbib, M. A. (2023). Pantomime within and Beyond the Evolution of Language. pp. 16-57. In: Żywiczyński, P., Wacewicz, S., Boruta-Żywiczyńska, M., & Blomberg, J. (Eds.) Perspectives on Pantomime: Evolution, Development, Interaction. Benjamins.

Arbib, M. A., Fragaszy, D. M., Healy, S. D., & Stout, D. (2023). Tooling and construction: From nut-cracking and stone-tool making to bird nests and language. Current Research in Behavioral Sciences, 5, 100121

Arbib, M.A., Barham, L., Braun, R., Calder, B., Fox, M., Healy, S., Memmott, P., Smith, M., Stiphany, K., and Watkins, T. (2024) How Humans Came to Construct Their Worlds. A CARTA Symposium. Abstracts and videos of the talks are at https://carta.anthropogeny.org/events/how-humans-came-construct-their-worlds.